Changes in a Time of War
by Miranda Flairgold
Summary: Sequel A Second Chance at Life. Harry is training in bloodmagic/necromancy, he is becoming a basilisk with a thunderbird's soul, there's a plague in europe, demons are about to invade Earth, and Voldemort needs to die. Fae, vampires, new magics and school
1. Chapter 1

Changes in a Time of War

By Miranda Flairgold

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From the author that brought you bloodmagic, demons, ice dragons and thunderbirds here isthe sequel to my fanfic A Second Chance at Life. If you have not read it, do so. This fic takes up where that one left off.

I own nothing you recognize, and everything you don't.

Rating will be PG-13 to R (I think rating depends on your personal opinion). This rating is for violence, not sexual content. Expect sadistic graphic violence, as anyone reading this has read the first in the series you know what to expect.

There will be several very short term pairings with original characters (I mean short, as in one-nighters). Both m/m and f/m, nothing too graphic and most of it has little to do with the main character. I believe I said in the last fic that this would not be slash – as in the main character in a homosexual relationship, I also believe I mentioned that it wasn't het either. I don't want to have to repeat this anymore, I'm not changing my mind so please don't beg for your favorite pairing, it isn't happening. The main character has no long term pairing of any sort and, actually, gets very little action, it's mostly the other characters.

If it goes higher than R I'll move it to another website and put up a link.

If you wish to use any of this in your own fics please do so, just add a note saying where you go it from. Thanks.

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Chapter 1

_So serving Voldemort did not suit you. _Rahkesh asked, eyeing the asp viper coiled in his armchair. Xasseri was an old snake, but not at all slowed by his age. Not terribly venomous, but smart enough to know where best to bite. Rahkesh had pegged him at once as a clever old beast. The snake was much like some gnarled old soldier. A very tough fellow, but smart enough to choose his battles with care. Experienced in everything with few illusions left about how the world worked. Xasseri would be very useful as an ally, but he was only loyal so long as he agreed with what was going on, and he was not inclined to let just anyone plan his life for him.

_Not at all. I do not appreciate being talked down to, and Nagini was…ssss…a problem. He was also incapable of listening to any advice but his own. _Xasseri replied. Rahkesh suspected he'd been about to say something more descriptive. Xasseri would make a good advisor, and the cunning old snake was a decent sort, at least on the surface. Rahkesh suspected his sense of humor might be rather darker than what he liked but that wouldn't hurt. He also suspected that Xasseri was probably quite manipulative when he wanted to be, and extremely independent. That was fine, though the first part might be an issue.

Rahkesh refilled his tea cup with the black verbena tea, he'd been drinking the stuff by the pot, letting its healing effects help wash away the last few days. He let the snake be for the moment and leaned back into the other armchair, looking out the window across the field of wildflower outside the cottage – it really was too small to be called a house. It was evening, three days after the battle at Lord Hadrian's manor. Alastor and Regulus had left not long after Nagini's destruction. Both of them had been reluctant to leave after seeing Rahkesh collapse, something Rahkesh wished they hadn't witnessed. But he wasn't good enough to obliviate them both. Alastor, as usual trusting Rahkesh to handle himself, had left with only a little argument, Regulus however had been deeply concerned, eventually Alastor had dragged him off. After Rahkesh's Basilisk form got annoyed and started stirring. The magic catching Alastor's attention and warning him that Rahkesh was not in control and the snake did not appreciate the well-intentioned concern. Basilisks were notoriously independent, especially Rahkesh's subspecies, which left its mother at birth and never saw another of its own kind again expect for territorial battles and mating. In the case of the latter the pair would bond for upwards of a month, and then often as not get so sick of having another being around that one would kill the other before a week was up. Rahkesh was just glad that it had been the basilisk, not the thunderbird, to wake up first. That one was even more temperamental.

Finding out that he was the last missing horcrux had been the worst shock Rahkesh had ever had. The horror of knowing that he was keeping his worst enemy alive, through a mechanism built with the deaths of his parents…Rahkesh blocked out that train of thought. He wasn't ready to deal with it yet. He would of course have to find a way to remove and destroy the horcrux, if it was possible to do so without killing himself…if not, Rahkesh wasn't sure what he'd do. He liked being alive, especially since he'd started schooling at Akren Mountain School of Magic. Did he want to get rid of Voldemort enough to commit suicide? Hopefully it was a question he'd never have to answer. There had to be a way to remove it.

A stinging sensation in his wrists made him flinch; he picked up a bowl filled with black liquid from the floor. The Akren version of final exams had been the opposite of most Hogwarts exams. Not particularly stressful mentally, but extremely so physically. Writing essays was all well and good, but could you actually apply what you had learned without having an essay question to prod your memory? It had been obstacle course exams for the most part. He'd done well. He knew he had. The last part had had him brewing a counter to a poison for Potions Master Strawlime, then being told to drink the poison and filter it out of him via bloodmagics. The counter was in case he spilled any of it onto himself. It had to go out the bloodmagic runes at the release points without touching any skin. The skin would rot away in seconds to the bone, and wouldn't stop until it consumed him. So if anything went wrong with his bloodmagic he had the counter to fall back on, assuming he'd brewed it right. Strawlime hadn't checked it. Rahkesh supposed survival was enough proof. No one had told him the potion bubbled madly when exposed to open air, making it certain it would get on his skin. The only way to survive was to manage both the counter and the bloodmagic part.

Drawing a simple un-enchanted knife he made a cut on his left wrist and began to concentrate. Slowly the bloodmagic responded and Rahkesh began to pull the last of the poison out of him. In addition to drinking it Strawlime had also injected it into his leg muscles. Which was why he was only now filtering out the last of it. Removing poison from muscle tissue took time.

The last of the poison, inky black, dripped into the bowl. As his wrist healed Rahkesh grabbed the counter he'd brewed and a cloth, wiping the viscous metallic blue liquid over the already rotting skin on his wrist. He waited until it was dry, and began casting healing spells. His counter hadn't been perfect, barely enough to get the job done. He would never make potions master, unless he wanted to spend his life on it, but he'd done enough to survive. That was all Akren really required. He hoped his friends had managed okay, he had seen them before leaving and they had looked healthy enough.

The Akren break was short, enough time to heal from the final exams and take a quick vacation. The school was open during the summer and a lot of students just stayed all year, spending their summers hiking in the mountains and maybe visiting the centaurs. Rahkesh had wanted to get away for a bit, both because Akren's vicious competition could get tiring and because he wanted to be more involved in what was happening to his homeland.

Sygra entered the room, followed by Siraka. The two female snakes joined Xasseri on his chair. Sygra draped over the back and wound through the wooden backrest – built to resemble elk antlers. Siraka coiled up next to Xasseri, she seemed to have made a friend there.

Why the snake hadn't simply taken off into the forest Rahkesh wasn't sure. Possibly he'd been around humans for so long that he found life without them tedious and boring. That was entirely possible. He'd been with Voldemort nearly a year, planning and recruiting and giving bold and often annoying advice that had on more than one occasion gotten him cursed. He said what he thought rather than what you wanted to hear. Rahkesh liked that.

_Well Xasseri you're welcome to stay here for now. I have a few weeks off in the summer before the next school year starts._ Rahkesh said. _And I would truly appreciate your advice in my dealings with Voldemort. He is an embarrassment to snake-speakers and an insane and dangerous wizard. He has been attacking his own kind and starting wars, I am attempting to counter him._

_I'd like that._ Xasseri replied after a moment of thought. Rahkesh nodded and asked Siraka to show him around and introduce the other snakes. He didn't have to tell her that Xasseri was not to go in the greenhouse where his Dyalnos tree was currently growing. He didn't trust Xasseri _that _much yet. He also asked Siraka to tell the snake a bit more about what Voldemort really was. Siraka knew all about the horcruxes so she could explain them. The idea of a split soul was repugnant to snakes and killing for reasons other than for food or in self defense, or in battle for a mate wouldn't fit with Xasseri's view of the world. The old serpent would likely be angry with his former master.

Rahkesh sensed the wards stir and closed his eyes, seeking them out and allowing his two guests to enter. Daray and Ally had agreed to stop by after the final exams, though Silas was still recovering from his finals, and wasn't up to traveling yet.

Daray, in full demon form, loped through the open front door, spotted the couch (an exact replica of the one Rahkesh had at school) and leaped onto it. Ally followed him in, one arm in a sling.

"You'd think after a full year he'd get over his obsession." She growled, enlarging another chair since Daray showed no sign of making room on the couch.

"One would think so." Rahkesh agreed. The big black demon twisted its head around and flicked its tongue at them, before transforming. "Any change?" Rahkesh asked with real concern. There had been a possibility of the stress of the finals causing a shift in Daray's already unstable condition.

"No. My skin itches and my joints ache and I've been having minor head aches, but nothing new." Daray replied, "Grandmother, Namach and that dragon researcher whatever her name was…Mariah? asked me to tell you they're coming over in a bit."

"Did they say why?"

"I'd assume with the ancients its something about the battle three days ago or some such. Mariah however wants to talk to both of us."

"Just great, I hope she hasn't found another of those paintings Vera did of everyone. Anything new Ally?"

"Yeah, I grabbed a few of the fae while they were moving out of their rooms. I don't know if it's the message you sent through Rianae's mother or what but they've decided against all out war on mortals. For now they're moving their people out and protecting their homes with magic so they can't be damaged while they're away. The fae have always been a bit standoffish but they're going to stop that and start mixing more with mortals, vampires and werewolves. So there's some hope there, a complete mixing of the races in all of the peaceful locations. However the fae have ruled that they will execute any mortal that sets foot on their property while this crisis lasts. They do still own the land and if anyone tries to pass a law taking it away the fae will have plenty of assassins standing by to deal with them. If the anti-magical beings groups start looting it could get real ugly."

"Naturally they will invade the fae's land as soon as they're gone. And if they don't do it on their own the vampires will manipulate them into doing it." Daray said. "The general consensus is that we _want_ this war. The more people killed the better. The goal after all is to deplete the populace until they can't fight, then we rebuild our society with all the magical beings, and then graciously allow the mortals in."

"A goal the centaurs agree with, their herds here will be showing themselves, coming out their forest lairs for once. They're hoping to be attacked so that they have an excuse to counter attack." Ally reminded them.

"What about everyone who can't leave but who doesn't agree with the new laws?" Rahkesh asked.

"Too bad for them." The vampire growled.

"The fae are considering bloodmagic, marking those few people with something vampires, werewolves, centaurs, fae, something they all can sense. Maybe it would minimalize casualties for those who really can't get out. But then of course the questions are: who's lying about their reasons for staying and who's telling the truth…and who's just being patriotic or ignorant?"

"Most of those who are staying are probably doing so because they have family who can't leave and want to stay with them." Rahkesh point out, remembering the Weasely's. Molly was unlikely to desert Ron, though Percy might be another matter…but he was already gone.

"There comes a time when your own survival is more important. If your children or parents are bigoted fools you're going to lose them anyway, no sense in dying yourself. Familial loyalty is all well and good, but is it a reason for suicide?" Daray asked, "I don't really know how you mortals work but we vampires know a lost cause when we see one."

"I don't suppose the vampires would listen if the Ministery's surrendered?" Rahkesh asked.

"Not a chance." Daray replied, "and they can't, they're politicians and the public is anti-vampire. You think our plan for removing the humans and then integrating them into a mixed society won't work?"

"I think it will work." Rahkesh said, not adding that this was the problem. The loss of life could wind up being tremendous. But it could work, it could work very well. If given a few decades, and vampires thought long term. "Voldemort?"

"Not really my area." Daray replied "As it is I'm not invited to the attacks on the Unspeakables and anti-vampire groups because of my demon form."

"Too out of control?" Ally asked.

"Yeah. I'll let you know what's happening when it happens but Voldemort isn't currently my concern. The family is working on the general public. Of course if big bad and dark shows up we'll help out, but I think hunting him may end up being grandmothers job, or Namach. I don't know what they've got planned."

"Alright, I'm heading home. I'll keep you posted on what's happening." Ally said. With a wave she was gone. Once she had left the property entirely Rahkesh turned back to Daray.

"How bad is it really?" He asked. Daray scowled at him then shrugged.

"I transformed twice during my finals, couldn't help it. I didn't attack anyone but the pressure is getting much more intense. Namach has a place where I could go through whatever metamorphosis this is safely, so does grandmother, but I don't know how to do it." Daray growled, frustrated. The vampire flinched suddenly and stopped breathing, Rahkesh put his tea aside and drew his wand, just in case. Abruptly Daray convulsed and transformed. The demon twitched, then gasped and shuddered. "Damn it." Daray muttered, "I can feel what has to happen, but it's just out of reach. Like trying to see something through fog or mist. Too blurry to describe, but there all the same."

Rahkesh hummed and reached out mentally, breathing deeply and sinking into a half meditative trance. Giving the vampire a mental tap on the shoulder to warn him he then waited until he had a strong hold over his telepathy and began examining what magics the demon vampire was giving off. Abruptly his bloodmagic flared and with it his magic began elevating his senses. A dark spicy scent followed by a wave of alarm screaming danger, Rahkesh brushed it aside. Blood, death, and a dark purring magic. Then uncontrolled magic swirling around Daray, and though Rahkesh's eyes were closed he envisioned sparkling lights like fire dancing over the demon. The magic was pulsing steadily, then the steady beat switched, becoming and unsteady erratic thumping against his telepathic senses, that would be the demon trying to transform. Sparks and a swift brush of pain, sizzling energy that was trying to do something, but had no guidance from its origin-which was Daray.

"Interesting." Rahkesh said aloud as he reigned in his magics and awakened himself. There was something about that…it had felt a bit like Namach's magic, and not the vampiric part. Did Namach know demon magics? Highly unlikely, but they felt a bit similar. Perhaps one of the ancient vampire's other animaguses was closely related to a demon. A Hellhound maybe? Or perhaps Daray had been right and the ancient did have a death dragon lurking in his soul. That last seemed most likely. "Very interesting. What are you doing over break?"

"Originally I was supposed to help the family here in Europe. But with my _condition"_ Daray sneered, "I'll have to stay out of most of the action. We don't actually have decent base here yet, I'll be getting maps of the area and doing background searches on the leaders of some of the anti vampire movements. Some undercover work with uncle Grath disguised as mortal wizards."

"What about Silas?"

"He'll be working with uncle Grath all summer. He's got a knack for disguise and deception. Maybe he gets it from Nuri, the cat _can _hypnotize people after all. Or maybe Nuri gets that from him. Either way he's better at acting like a mortal than I am." Daray said. Rahkesh chuckled at the idea of Daray acting like a mortal. That would be amusing to see.

The wards shifted and Rahkesh felt a touch of telepathy breeze across his mind. His guests of course had simply slipped past the wards, they could have done so without being noticed, but they were being polite. When you're that powerful there's no need to show off or be rude. The Akren vampire students might bully, none of his guests had any need to, their positions in the vampiric hierarchy were very secure. He pulled another chair off the shelf and enlarged it, since Daray's demon form took up the entire couch and then some, the long powerful tail dropping off onto the floor.

"They're here," he warned Daray, since the demon probably wasn't in the best shape mentally right now. Daray sniffed the air and growled.

"Have you been that way since the finals?" Namach asked from the doorway. Cyala appeared seconds later and followed him in and took the other seat. A minute later Mariah arrived…and following her was a very familiar looking blond.

Rahkesh relaxed and evened out his breathing, trying not to show his shock. He'd wondered of course what had happened to Draco Malfoy…but he'd never thought he'd been captured by the vampires. Why hadn't he got word of this? The elder Malfoy currently belonged to Farov – Rahkesh almost had to pity Lucius…almost – but when and how had Mariah wound up owning Draco?

Mariah took the last chair, Draco sitting down by her feet, keeping his eyes on the floor. Rahkesh was quite certain that Draco wouldn't recognize him, he'd changed an awful lot, and especially since the dragon magic had changed his eyes, never mind the height difference between him and the Harry Potter that Draco had known. All the same the presence of his old school rival made him uncomfortable.

"Someone we should know?" Daray asked, flicking his tail over the mortal's head.

"My newest slave, had to replace old Linus. This is Draco Malfoy, I'm headed over to Hadrian's after this, Draco here was a death eater so Hadrian asked for any information he might have."

"Malfoy eh?" Rahkesh said, "I've heard that name, Farov's been going on about another of that family, his father probably." Rahkesh watched as Draco's skin went grey and he choked.

"Ah, that explains a lot. When Farov found out I had this one he tried to buy him." Mariah said. Now Rahkesh couldn't help but pity Draco, Farov wasn't the type to give up easy, and he kept stables of pretty young male slaves around. "I haven't actually said no yet, you see this one has been a problem. That is why I'm here now. He is intelligent enough and much more than average for a mortal in power, it is the inner workings of his mind that are a problem. Draco, wait outside for me." Mariah ordered abruptly, nodding towards the door. Draco rose and left, Mariah closed the door magically, a move that sent up all the silencing and anti-eavesdropping wards automatically.

"You are asking for help getting his mind back on track?" Rahkesh asked, knowing the answer already. Mariah sighed nodded.

"I usually put little effort into my slaves, but this one is unusual. I do not know all that happened to him before I captured him, but he was a death eaters, and failure at that. I know he was tortured extensively for that failure. I do have a mastery in mind magics and when I look beyond the immediate I see some far reaching mental issues going back many years. I also sense an innate intelligence quite beyond what I have found in most other mortals. He must have an exceptionally high IQ, and he's powerful and capable, but I haven't seen any sign of any of that being put to use. With old Linus dead I need an assistant I can rely on in my research. Being a slave I can force his loyalty, but I want to awaken that mind. He's also got a phobia of vampires; possibly caused by being tortured by Voldemort's followers, its formation is that recent, and that apathy has to go." Mariah finished, watching Rahkesh.

Rahkesh thought it over, he owed Mariah a lot. Had she made that painting she had discovered public it would have been one of the biggest finds in magical creature research in centuries, and it would have been very bad for Rahkesh. She'd given it to him instead. She'd also been helpful in suggesting how to incorporate his new dragon magic to his bloodmagic early on – dragon pressure points unique to the bloodline Enireth hailed from to aid in the place of runes in his bloodmagic rituals. He wasn't quite sure what she wanted, but he did owe her. And as much as he disliked Draco he knew he wasn't a complete lost cause. His inability to kill Albus Dumbledore did stand for something. Rahkesh was sure Draco's life had been much like his own before leaving Hogwarts; his life controlled by others, used as a weapon and tool in power struggles he didn't really want a part of but had been heavily trained to willingly participate in under the direction of someone else.

"What are your plans for him?"

"At this point I'd like to break whatever mental block he's got, it's self inflicted. And based on what happens after, either train him personally as my research assistant or have him trained at Akren." Mariah replied, shocking Rahkesh, and clearly Daray as well. Since when did anyone go through that much trouble for an assistant?

"Why so much effort?" Rahkesh asked. Mariah didn't have to answer, but his tone of voice indicated that if she didn't he might refuse.

"Because if he turns out to be exceptional enough I might turn him and adopt him." Mariah replied calmly, shocking Rahkesh yet again, his mind instantly went into overdrive. Vampires did not just adopt human slaves and turn them into vampires. And Mariah was old; she had to be pushing two thousand, maybe a bit more. Namach was over three thousand, Cyala (according to Daray) was only a few centuries less than him. Rahkesh had checked historical records after meeting Mariah and his best guess was that Mariah had to be _at least_ eight centuries younger than Cyala, but not much more than a thousand years younger. Her family was her self and two others. Both of whom had been slaves she'd turned into vampires. Whoever had created her was dead, along with any siblings or older relatives. She was the head of her bloodline. No one could control whom she chose to turn except for those more powerful than her. Mariah wasn't immensely powerful, less than most her age actually. A lot less. She hadn't been a mortal when turned nor had she been a squib, but she certainly hadn't been a powerful witch. Probably a bit less than average. But she held enough awards from vampiric weapons contests to make anyone think twice about taking her on. More than anyone else her age had. And she was brilliant.

And she saw some sort of potential in Draco. It was her way to train slaves and then turn them as adults, so that wasn't unusual at all, for her. Linus, her old slave, had been trained at Akren, but she hadn't turned him, had he not been good enough? She certainly had standards. She had been the first vampire to educate human slaves to University degrees. Of her slaves half had earned PhDs. Mariah was an oddball and completely bizarre, every news article he'd found on her had said so. Her fellow vampires didn't know what to make of her, and therefore left her alone. She had no allegiances, and no enemies. All she wanted was to conduct her work in peace.

"Why would you do that?" Rahkesh asked curiously.

"I could just hire a recent graduate, but I'd prefer to have control over what classes they took. What I'd like is an actual apprentice, perhaps vampire perhaps not. But I need the ability to kill them easily should it ever become necessary. And I have all my slaves educated. With Linus's demise I need another to take his place and none of my other slaves are suitable. This one meets all the requirements, but for whatever mental issues he has. He has also shown a keen interest in my work, and he's quite clever."

"Hmmm," Rahkesh replied, thinking it over. "And a fear of vampires." Well there was an easy solution to all of this.

"Very well, he can stay here for a few weeks, I'll see what he knows and see how well he learns. Daray, you're going to be around anyway, how about you stay here as well for a bit, I'd like your help waking up whatever tougher side he has." Rahkesh knew from the looks that older vampires were giving him that they all thought he was completely insane, getting _Daray_ to _help _a mentally damaged mortal with a fear of vampires. Daray grinned and purred, showing all the demon fangs.

"He is _awfully_ nice." Daray agreed, eyeing the mortal through the window, who was staring at a thestral outside. "Probably tastes good too." Cyala shook her head, Namach looked over at Draco, back to Daray, then to Rahkesh. The ancient eyed Rahkesh, he knew Rahkesh wouldn't hand another mortal over to Daray, knowing as he did the vampire's more vicious tendencies, unless he had a plan. Rahkesh winked, Namach looked back at Daray, then at Draco. Who had a glassy permanently dazed look about him, it was rather morbid and clearly showed some definite mental damage.

But Rahkesh had a hunch, and he trusted his instincts. He also knew Draco, an added advantage. Draco had never been one to back down or give up, he had a fiery streak, that was all that was really missing right now. If he could get that side back, the part that would curse someone who bumped into him, then he could solve anything else bothering Draco easily. What Draco needed was a challenge. Daray, who was eyeing Draco like he would a particularly tasty meal, would do that naturally. Rahkesh's job would be to rein Daray in and keep him from seriously traumatizing Draco until Draco woke up and fought back.

Namach caught the thoughts off the top of his mind, like skimming water off a pond. Rahkesh let him hear his plan, but kept back the part about knowing Draco, too much information. The ancient pondered for a moment, then nodded his agreement, there was a good chance it would work.

"Thank you Rahkesh, keep me updated?" Mariah asked. Rahkesh nodded his agreement.

"Send him over tomorrow." Mariah nodded and with a nod to the other two old vampires she swept out of the room. Catching Draco's shoulder they both blinked out silently.

"Have you been stuck in that form?" Namach asked, turning back to Daray once Mariah and her slave were gone.

"No, I've transformed back to vampire twice, couldn't hold it." Daray said. "Perhaps with a little rest."

"Well you've got a few weeks." Cyala said.

"Any progress finding Auzric?" Rahkesh asked. Short of finding Sharahak the missing vampire who no one knew anything about was Daray's best hope.

"No. Nothing." Namach said, Cyala shook her head, the matriarch of the Ateres family looked personally insulted, it wasn't often the Ateres assassins failed.

"Perhaps we should start looking at areas of elven activity." Namach said after a moment's silence. "I can't shake the notion that when we find Auzric, we'll find the elves involved. They and the demons are always at war, and if Auzric had anything to do with demons the elves will certainly not have let it pass. The fact that they never made any statement makes me wonder if they aren't involved in something they'd rather we not know about."

"When you start down that road you get into their war, and possibilities of demon invasion, and there's so much that could have happened to Auzric there…" Cyala trailed off. The possibility of a demon invasion was enough to make Voldemort faint from fear.

"And I'm afraid we're not going to have much time for looking around, we're starting on the Unspeakables soon and after that the anti-vampires cult/clubs/unions whatever you want to call them."

"What about Voldemort?" Daray asked, Rahkesh nodded, glad he hadn't had to ask that question.

"Well he lost a significant portion of whatever forces he has at the battle at Hadrian's manor. And failing to actually destroy the manor didn't look very good." Namach said, "he must have never considered the repairing bloodmagic built into the homes of the city masters, or indeed any old vampire."

"He also got a good look at the opposition, you can bet he'll plan better in the future." Rahkesh said. The two ancients chuckled and Mariah smirked.

"Needn't worry about that. We've got a few tricks left." Cyala smugly replied. "Actually that attack fitted very well into our plans," she added, nodding at Tristan, "we both like to show off a little every century or so. It's been about five centuries since anyone outside the family saw my dark angels at work, about time to remind everyone."

"What happened to those basilisks?' Rahkesh asked, not bothering to hide his knowledge of the battle.

"I preserved the corpses and have them at one of my castles." Namach said, "and what exactly were you doing there anyway?"

"Helping Alastor Moody with his part in stopping Voldemort." Rahkesh replied, "he needed a parseltongue for it, and he wasn't comfortable contacting the few others hanging around. Most of them try to pretend they're not parseltongues, the others are vampires he doesn't know, he's a bit paranoid about meeting new people."

"While we're on the topic, what _is_ this Alastor Moody doing exactly?" Cyala asked.

Rahkesh eyed the two vampires, and made a snap decision. He had no doubt that they both knew who he was anyway.

"There was a theory, fact now, that Voldemort had created horcruxes." He said. Drawing a shocked gasp from Cyala and a startled look from Namach. "Six of them, with the seventh fragment being Voldemort himself" Both vampires gave him blank stares.

"Six?" Namach finally asked. "Good grief, that must have taken years, and with all the unicorn blood he would have needed…it's a wonder he has a functional soul in any form or fragment."

"Yes six. Moody's got a small group with him, they've been tracking down the horcruxes, but most of his crowd is under Ministry surveillance, and Voldemort's got the Ministry infiltrated."

"So he checked the Akren records and saw you were a local." Cyala said, Rahkesh nodded. Let them draw their own conclusions.

"No old wizarding connections, and being home schooled I'm not really on record, a footnote at best. He explained the situation to me, and I've been helping out ever since." Rahkesh lied through his teeth, neither vampires called him on it.

"Six horcruxes." Namach muttered, "why?"

"Best guess? Immortality." Rahkesh replied.

"He's very powerful, why not just get a vampire to turn him?"

"Not the right type of immortality. And he'd be tied to whoever created him. And you can bet anyone with an ego like his couldn't take having to listen to his elders well." Rahkesh said. "Or maybe he did and it didn't work, Moody's got it from a reliable source that he's been drinking unicorn blood." That got another set of shocked blinks.

"I know he'd need it for the horcruxes, he's not well enough trained to do it the other way, but not to drink. Why would he do that?' Namach wondered, "using for the horcrux creation causes enough damage…What has Moody told you about the horcruxes?" Namach asked after moment.

"Everything he knows. Moody's been tracking down horcruxes and stealing them to be destroyed. Of the seven three are officially dead. Of the remainder one is a locket – which is missing – stolen by someone else, one is a gold cup – we have it, and the last is unknown, then there's Voldemort. We were pursuing the idea of a particular black unicorn horn, but that's fallen through."

"You say one was retrieved?"

"Yes, only we don't know how to destroy it." Rahkesh said. Cyala glanced at Namach, who hummed softly to himself for a moment.

"I can help with that." The ancient said finally. "Though not at Akren. I have other places better suited to this."

"Is there a way to search for the others using soul magic?" Rahkesh asked.

"Unlikely. Horcruxes weren't all _that_ rare back in the day. Especially when they were first invented, they've been around for nearly two thousand years. There are many out there, pieces of furniture inhabited by souls of wizards whose bodies got destroyed. A lot of so called "enchanted objects" that can't be unenchanted, are actually horcruxes. I'd say you could scan all of Europe and find maybe a hundred of them. And maybe twice as many improperly created ones that still register. They've fallen out of favor since the death penalty stopped; they were created by dark wizards so that they could survive their executions or by people worried about being killed during witch hunts. Most wizards die during the creation of them so unless you can see your death coming it isn't usually worth it. Besides, if someone steals a piece of your soul they can gain complete control over you. Though that doesn't work if there are multiple horcruxes, you'd need all of them."

"Is there any way it would be possible to find them all?" Rahkesh persisted.

"A blood relative might do it. And it might be possible to use one to find the others, I doubt he found out the correct safeguards against that, even if he did learn how to make them. Making them is the easy part."

"No blood relatives. But we've got one horcrux." Rahkesh said, making the decision then to talk to Namach privately afterward and tell him about the horcrux he carried.

"I could try that then. Which one were you after at the battle?"

"He turned his pet snake into one; we were trying to get her. I killed her with a parseltongue killing curse shortly afterward."

"He used a living creature?" Namach asked.

"Yeah."

"Interesting, perhaps he knows more about them than I thought. There's a slightly different process. But I suppose anyone clever enough and deep enough into dark magics could figure it out. Did it explode when you destroyed it?"

"Yes it did, not even any pieces left." Rahkesh said, Namach paused, thinking that over.

Cyala and Daray both closed their eyes, getting a telepathic signal. Cyala twisted a gem on a bracelet until it glowed blue.

"We're off then, I'll be back tomorrow I guess." Daray said, following Cyala as she suddenly vanished. "Aunt Tashanna has a new potion she thinks will stop the transformation for a little while." Once outside Daray leaped skyward and apparated in midair.

"It would almost be worth the whole demon thing, to be able to fly like that." Rahkesh sighed. Namach chuckled.

"There is such a thing as partial animagi transformations. You're probably a year away from that, both in bloodmagic and because your forms haven't settled yet. However in a year or so you might be able to just call up the wings. It's a ten ritual process, and very dangerous." Namach told Rahkesh.

"I always seem to do the best with the most dangerous ones, the "easier" ones are always harder." Rahkesh complained. He should have been pleased, but it was aggravating. It meant he couldn't use other's opinions to gauge how dangerous any ritual was and whether or not he should wait a month or two between steps.

"You also do best in those that involve bringing yourself closest to death." Namach replied calmly. Rahkesh turned and blinked at him. "Now whether that is because of having a horcrux dwelling alongside your own soul or because you survived a killing curse I'm not sure, but you have a very keen sense of where the line between death and life is. You managed the ritual for poison removal with little difficulty and unlike nearly everyone else your exit marks are perfect. Most people have great difficulty figuring out exactly how deep they need to cut to almost kill themselves, but not actually do it."

Huh. So the vampire knew about both secrets. Hardly surprising but still…Rahkesh was way too into the secrecy thing. Of course it wasn't paranoia if there actually were people out to get you right? Clearly Namach had known for a while, and didn't care at all beyond the bloodmagic and necromancy potential involved in having a connection to death like his. But that didn't reassure Rahkesh any.

"Should make necromancy much easier." He agreed calmly, not letting any surprise or upset show. He had been expecting that after all, at some point.

"Yes. You have a rare potential for that." Namach agreed. "I'd suggest not looking at the horcrux you carry, I've got a library of soul magic and I know there are a few other accounts of people being used as horcruxes. Don't even try to examine it until I've had a chance to review those."

"Very well. And thank you."

"It isn't every day you get a student with your possibilities." The vampire grinned, eyes sparkling. Rahkesh wondered if he should be flattered or frightened that Namach enjoyed teaching him. "You know that if you have part of Voldemort's soul he might have part of yours?"

Rahkesh could feel his blood freeze and his skin pale. He hadn't thought of that. Namach saw the look on his face and looked sympathetic.

"It might be possible to get it back, I'll need to examine my records. But then again it might not be possible. However, it may be very useful one day."

"How?"

"Every person is capable of destroying their own soul; you just have to destroy that piece of it and not the rest." Namach supplied.

As the vampire left to check his libraries Rahkesh realized that Namach had just handed him the key to Voldemort's destruction.

-

-

Horcruxes, wars, vampires, demons oh my! Okay how many people didn't get it in the last fic that Draco had ended up as Mariah's slave? Got to catch the hint folks. I known a lot of you saw that.

-

OK tell me what you think. I know I ended the last fic rather abruptly but that one was about Harry becoming Rahkesh and about Akren. This one has a slightly different focus. Voldemort will be gone by the end of it, but no fear, I hope to continue with the story, there's plenty more to come after his demise.


	2. Chapter 2

917brat - don't worry, I haven't forgotten Hedwig. I have a plan for her later, and buckbeak.

sympatheticassassin - I will get around to explaining how the potters got the dyalnos seeds, it is important, not hugely so but it will be explained.

MikoCola - don't worry about the vampires, it won't happen. Unfortunately my plans for the elves do not include amoebas.

Maxennce - there is no intention in the vampires obliterating wizards society, just wait and see.

evilinabox2 - yes string magic will return

gryfny - I'll explain that at some point, thanks for asking, I hadn't realized I hadn't made it clear enough.

-

Chapter 2

The sun was setting, a red fireball behind the trees. Rahkesh eyed the thestrals through the kitchen window, he still had no idea where the beasts had come from or where they went when they weren't grazing on the meadows around the cottage, everything else was dense woods. It might be worth following them, or at least getting to know them.

Mariah and Daray were talking in the sitting room while Rahkesh was finishing a potion that he had frozen overnight. It had occurred to him that Daray would probably be drinking Draco's blood a lot. And when vampires drank their victim's blood they could see all of the victim's life. Daray didn't need Draco's memories of Harry Potter.

There was a good chance Mariah, being a fairly old vampire, would be secretive about her research and her home. They were all touchy about who knew what about their lairs, in a world that had changed so much from what it had been during the first thousand or so years of their lives having their secret home known only to themselves offered a sense of security. Being secretive was also good security because no one knew what they were really capable of. In the vampire guidebook to staying alive the more secrets you had the better. If Mariah thought like that then she would have already given Draco several potions to block any other vampires reading his mind.

The potion was a back up, brewed with a little of Harry Potters blood. Since drinking dragon blood Rahkesh had changed, but he managed to find some blood from early on in his stay in the Room of Requirement. He'd drawn it then for use in potions that he had reconsidered brewing. He had thought to preserve it and it was still useable. The potion would remove Daray's memories of anything to do with Harry Potter, he'd give it to Daray in a few weeks, after their attempt to get Draco to reawaken. Daray might be his friend, but everyone had their secrets and those secrets would be protected, information divulged to those whom you thought should know, and at Akren that was understood. Daray reported most of what Rahkesh did to Cyala, and if Namach wanted to know anything he could find out by drinking Daray's blood, since he habitually drank from all the vampire students this was hardly unusual. Rahkesh would blur Daray's memories of anything to do with Harry Potter's mannerisms or appearance or magic in order to protect his past. And if he ever told Daray about it the vampire would just shrug and accept it. Rahkesh would not have been surprised or angry if some of his memories from his time at the Ateres family palace had been removed or blocked for security reasons.

"I really have no idea if this will work or not. One week?" Mariah asked. The dragon researcher was sitting beside the small fireplace sipping warm blood she had brought with her from a tea cup. Rahkesh would have to remember to clean it thoroughly.

"Sure, I've only got one good idea about how to deal with this and one week should be long enough to see if anything results." Rahkesh replied. And that idea was a long shot. He looked over at Daray who was, naturally, sprawled across the couch. Daray was getting frustrated with not being able to join the rest of his family in their plans and the drive to go the transformation he knew nothing about was driving him nuts. If the vampire did as Rahkesh expected he would they'd know within a week if Draco had it in him to become anything useful. If he wasn't a complete loss he'd fight back eventually, once Daray pushed him far enough. If he was as useless as Rahkesh thought he might be then he'd just get meeker.

Mariah called Draco in from outside, then apparated out. Daray, having decided that Draco didn't need to see his demon form, became human again. Rahkesh did a quick check to make sure he disguise was perfect, scar covered, hair altered, eye color changed by the dragon blood. He had also worked hard to develop an accent that was vaguely Canadian while at Akren. His firebolt had been painted and was hidden, his wand had a tiny thunderbird carved into the handle – the fae Justin knew how to carve wands without damaging them and would carve just about anything for a small fee. The shape of his face had changed a bit when he had used the growth potions, and a bit more since his thunderbird transformation. Nothing to remind Draco in any way of Harry Potter.

"You know there's no chance he'll make it into Akren, even if he does heal." Daray drawled, finally opening his eyes. Rahkesh wasn't sure if he'd actually been asleep…but given that Mariah hadn't set him on fire for being rude to an elder he probably hadn't been. Mariah might be awfully nice for the vampire, once you knew her, but Rahkesh doubted even she would tolerate being ignored by a young vampire.

"Yeah I agree. I think Mariah knows it too, Akren is a long shot. I don't know what she's looking for, but I agree with her that he is something more than what we've been seeing." Rahkesh agreed, of course he knew Draco and therefore had an advantage. But why Mariah had declared Akren a possibility was beyond him. Rahkesh only knew Draco from his time at Hogwarts, which was plenty, he didn't think he'd missed anything major.

Draco nervously appeared in the doorway, looking around at both of them. He was thinner than Rahkesh remembered, paler if that was possible. He was trembling and sweating, Rahkesh didn't think he'd ever seen anyone that terrified. Daray looked him over head to foot and purred. "Well I can see why Farov's interested. Send him to one of the training facilities for sex slaves, do something about that hair, he could be a valuable one."

Rahkesh winced, yes he and Daray were friends, but the vampire really did look at the world in very different way than Rahkesh did. Well not the whole world, or even all mortals, just slavery really. Rahkesh was reminded again about the old saying that "vampires crave two things, blood and sex…only one is essential for their continued existence, but don't try telling them that." He'd heard that from Ally, and it was perfectly accurate. Next the vampire was going to ask…

"Mariah didn't have any rules about drinking his blood and fucking him did she?"

…so predictable. Rahkesh rolled his eyes skyward. "Is the word 'subtle' in the vampiric dictionary?"

"Not concerning slaves." Daray replied, not the least embarrassed. "And she didn't say anything. How nice of her. You come from a line of purebloods?"

Draco looked absolutely terrified, Rahkesh was wondering when he'd faint. Daray, being about as clichéd as a vampire could get, was wearing all black, pants and vest, leather today despite the heat (being dead he probably didn't feel it), and was leering at the mortal, fangs showing. Like all vampires he was incredibly good looking but right now he was going for fear not seduction, and it was working very well.

"You remember Mariah said he had some sort of phobia of vampires. He seems unable to talk when too frightened, lay off a bit." Rahkesh told Daray. The vampire stretched back on the couch and relaxed into a non-threatening posture. "And you're _not _molesting him." Daray glanced over at Rahkesh, then snorted disbelievingly and looked back at Draco.

"I'll have to assume Mariah didn't train you at all. You certainly need it. Answer the question; do you come from a long line of purebloods?"

"Y-yes." Draco stuttered, he was shifting around nervously like he wanted to turn around and run. If given the chance he probably would.

"Nice. You know I've never tried blood from an old British family." Daray purred approvingly, switching into a tone designed more to seduce than to inspire fear. Rahkesh, being used to vampires and completely immune, rolled his eyes around again. In their way vampires were more obnoxious than veela. Though the vampires didn't see it that way; some humans were friends and allies, and most were food. However, much as he might disapprove Daray was doing exactly what he had hoped he would. Now Rahkesh just had to hold him back a bit, slowly let him increase until he pushed Draco too far and Draco fought back. Privately Rahkesh was hoping Draco would use some of the nastier curses he knew when he finally did grow a backbone, it might take Daray down a notch.

-

The walls had once been white plaster, now they were smudged to a gray color. Lighter in some spots where stains had been washed off or covered up, grayer with decades of grime in others. The long narrow hallway with the graying walls and black tile floor. No decorations, poor lighting, not a place most people wanted to go. The Office of Unspeakables, directly below the Department of Mysteries they worked in, liked it that way. Fewer visitors intruding on their domain. Even the Minister, whoever he might be, usually didn't come over to bother them in their own offices, because of the long walk down the gray walled corridor to the offices of the higher-ups was enough to creep out just about anyone. Except an Unspeakable or the rare exceptionally observant auror. To them the corridor wasn't dark and the walls weren't gray. They could see the delicate gold lines woven in a tapestry of runes and swirls across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Most wondered at what these beautiful spider-silk thin gold lines were. Only a few knew. Bloodmagic and threadmagic.

When the Department of Mysteries was founded the first director (an Akren Graduate though few knew it) had realized that the objects being studied might destroy or react adversely to any normal wards. And so experts had been hired to build protections into these buildings that would dissipate any magical reactions naturally across the whole building – adding their power to the wards while being diffused. Given all the centuries since of magic being practiced here there was a lot of power locked in the wards. The blood was of the first Unspeakables to be initiated into their cult-like group, and two of those had given their lives to necromancers and soul magic experts. Their lives and souls and magics woven into the wards to protect the secrets housed within. They had done well, the ones who had created the impressive defenses. But the defenses were old, and like any mercenaries their creators went with the highest bidder. And the Ateres clan was one of the wealthiest families of vampires to ever exist. Buying the locations and samples of the threads that held the wards together had been costly, even more so had been the names and drops of blood from the two sacrificed Unspeakables, but now centuries later it was worth it. The founder of the Unspeakables had of courses guessed that this would happen, and had included in the official statement read to each incoming Unspeakable and section on not deliberately angering the fae, vampires, or werewolves, if at all possible. The Ministry unfortunately, had no such statement read to the politicians who made the laws.

Cyala had split her team of twelve into three groups, they would go through the sections of the Department as time allowed, with her team starting in the Hall of Potions. The other two teams would handle most of the Unspeakables offices and training areas, her team would enter the Department of Mysteries and remove anyone working there. There weren't many Unspeakables left; anyone who had plans to leave had already done so. The few that remained were loyal to the Ministry, anti-vampire, or just fools who didn't believe that the vampires would ever attack them. Since the battle at Hadrian's manor hadn't made the mortal papers yet they didn't know that Voldemort's forces had been shattered by the vampires. When the story broke it would worded by the vampiric press so that the mortals wouldn't know that it had taken the lives of ten vampires to defeat the dark lord. They would seem unharmed and invincible.

It was very early, but the Unspeakables were notorious for working odd hours. Many of the devices and objects only worked at certain times. These magical artifacts were the real reason Cyala had called out a full dozen of her family for this mission. Hadrian was paying them of course, as were a few others who wanted specific politicians killed, but the real payoff was here. Her children would remove everything they could that might be useful. And they had all day; one of her grandsons was an expert in muggle weapons (his motto was that any problem could be solved, if only you had enough explosives) and had rigged some fire-starters in another part of the Ministry. These were designed to catch fire and the fire would keep everyone's attention elsewhere. The aurors offices (those that remained) would be smoked out, as would all the meeting halls, the Department of International Relations, the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts branch and the sports center. Most of the Ministry would be closed for the day. The fire would also accomplish another mission; the fires were built so that the blame would land on a politician who had been a strong supporter of the anti-magical creature laws. The Ateres had been hired by a vampire in Ireland to deal with that particular individual after he had encouraged a raid on the vampire's property. If everything went smoothly it would be a very good day for the Ateres.

There was more than one entrance to the Department of Mysteries, and not even the Unspeakables knew where they all were. Some had been forgotten, others were known only to certain Department heads. While the fleeing Unspeakables had been at odds with the Ministry and most of their society they had all been loyal to their Department. The Unspeakables were the only group of Ministry workers to come close to outright rebellion, and though they had dispersed they hadn't stopped their work. Cyala's spies had kept watch and many of them still returned, through unknown means, going to work across oceans and somehow appearing within the building itself. The Minister didn't know they were coming back every day. In exchange for not telling him the Department heads, and other important persons, who all disagreed with the Ministry, had pulled everyone off work today, except for those who were anti-magical being and loyal to the Minister. There weren't many of them, and the other Unspeakables had taken a vote and announced that they didn't care what happened to them. Since the ranks of the Unspeakables included two Akren alumni Cyala had decided that this was the best deal they were going to get. The alumni had told her negotiator that there wasn't a chance anyone would move to help their comrades, unless the vampires harmed certain experiments. Cyala had a list of what wasn't to be touched. However no one had thought to order her and her family to stay away from everything, therefore anything not mentioned should be removable. If the Unspeakables wanted to argue it later, the vampires would already be long gone.

Cyala looked over the heavy iron door that was one of the entrances to the Department of Mysteries. It was in the side of an inn building in Gloucester, owned by a retired Unspeakable, and nowhere near the rest of the Department, whatever magic sent you from Gloucester to the Department of Mysteries no one had ever been able to find out. Though there were five known ways to do it with thread, stone, feather, or blood magic. Plus one that only necromancers could use. Cyala didn't have the time to find out which one was used, and she didn't really care.

This door was always locked from the inside, even when people were working, and its wards were connected to the original ones to prevent magic from opening it from outside. Sabien came forward carrying two enchanted titanium bottles containing blood from the Unspeakables who had been sacrificed to build the wards. Taking out a paintbrush made from their bones (the finding of which had involved a trip to the local graveyard), he placed a few drops of each person's blood onto it, then began tracing a few of the runes. The bloodmagic lit up and began to glow. Elara then dipped a few old threads in the blood and pressed them into the threadmagic ward curling across the door. That done they both stepped back.

Cyala pricked her right index finger on a fang and added a drop of her blood. During the building of the wards she had snuck in and added a hint of her own blood to the mix. That way not only could she access them, but should she die any of those who were of her bloodline could as well. She pressed her finger to the door then closed her eyes and sank inward, seeking out the old bloodmagics.

It took a minute total, then the door sprang open, Sabien cast a spell to muffle any sound of the old hinges, Elara cast a spell to conceal any change in lighting between the corridor and the Department entrance, and the four vampires slipped inside, shutting the door silently behind them.

"Expelliarmus!"

Apparently not silently enough. There were two Unspeakables, the first one ducked as his spell was returned by Elara.

"Diffindo." Cyala stepped aside, then twisted to avoid a bright purple spell. Elara broke from the group and turned to face the Unspeakables, the other three walked right past. Behind them lights flashed and spells crashed back and forth. The Unspeakables were well trained. But Elara was better. Someone screamed horribly, then went silent. The other Unspeakable began screaming for backup. There would be none, the team had all cast silencing spells on the hallway before the first spell had been fired.

Cyala's team could find no one in the Time Chamber, and a lot of what she wanted was in here as well. She sent Janus, the fourth member of her team, into the rooms which housed magical potions brewed by unknown persons and which had unknown purposes, while she and Sabien did a quick inventory of the Time chamber and took anything especially valuable. Once they had the best stuff they could take their time with the potions. She wanted as many of them as she could get. Especially one large blue diamond container Namach had requested – he'd brewed it nearly two thousand years earlier and had completely forgotten what it was for, but he didn't like the Ministry having it.

Janus was a wiry vampire of eight hundred years, originally from Mongolia he hadn't been turned as an infant, but at the age of eighteen. Bright to the point of genius he had taught himself to read and write two languages and speak another by the age of twelve. The Akren talent scouts, following traces of massive accidental magic, had found the then sixteen year old trying to single handedly reinvent necromancy using the bodies of raiders he and his brothers had killed. He'd come pretty close to animating the corpses and the flows of magic traveling through the intestines laid in geometric shapes had started affecting the weather. There were two branches of necromancy, one that required the bodies/blood/lives of others, and one that relied upon the necromancers blood. Janus did both but preferred the former as it gave him a chance to put criminals to good use. Cyala, needing someone who liked that branch of necromancy and who was willing to travel to far corners of the world seeking the perfect corpse for it, had followed the Akren talent scouts. She'd caught Janus when he left the school for winter break. Being very much alone and unaccustomed to anything but the rough life he'd known in Mongolia Janus had been very interested in joining the Ateres family. Two years later Tashanna had turned him, Janus changed his name and never looked back.

Janus ran into trouble immediately. There were three Unspeakables in the hallway, two holding delicate looking containers. This presented a problem, if those containers broke on the ground who knew what would happen, but getting them away from the Unspeakables would be tough.

"Stop to your will be killed!" One of the Unspeakables, a woman, shouted. Janus tossed a heart attack causing curse at her and pulled out a throwing star. Depending upon how valuable those containers were the Unspeakables would probably prefer to lose them than risk fighting while carrying them.

"Accio." The two containers landed easily by his feet, unharmed for the moment. The Unspeakables were no fools, they'd let them go. A barrage of purple and green spells followed the potions. Janus blocked all three and attacked. One of the Unspeakables drew a knife, then doubled over with a wrenching scream as a throwing star went into his guts. Poisons along its edges went into his blood and he fell, convulsing in a wild seizure.

Janus ducked a whip of red light, the female Unspeakable's shield was weaker on her left side so he aimed for her elbow and threw a shield piercing curse followed by an intestine rupturing one aimed at her guts. The Unspeakable held through the first but it shifted her attention to her left and the second cracked her shield. She fell screaming. Janus crushed her skull and moved on. The last one was backing off, firing spells. Janus winced as one burned into his shoulder, but ignored it, later it would swell with poisonous puss, but he was a vampire so it would not be harmful. The last one was running, trying to get reinforcements or some sort of safe place to fight from. First Janus fired off six shield piercers, one after the other, then two pinching curses, then a blasting curse at the Unspeakable's feet. The man was good, he stopped all but the last but then he stumbled and Janus stopped and balanced his feet, then cast a curse often cheerfully termed in classes at Akren as the Curse of a Thousand Skewers. It had a nasty backlash, enough to knock the caster head over heels, but if it hit anything whatever it was, flesh or titanium, would be hit as though with razor sharp skewers. More effective than a gun the small holes would go for several feet through solid rock, or flesh.

With the last Unspeakable dead Janus moved the bodies into a corner and looked up and down the hallway. His silencing spell was still intact, he could feel that, and apparently no one had seen the lights.

The second team of assassins was led by Norovosi, a thread magic specialist. He disabled the remaining wards in five minutes then led his team into a section of offices. The vampires had known that most everyone was gone, but they were astonished to find the offices completely deserted. They were even more astonished by the array of computers. Witches and wizards didn't typically even know what a computer was. Someone capable of looking beyond the obvious had been at work here, muggleborn perhaps, but more likely one of the two Akren graduates. Norovosi had their profiles; one had a degree from some prestigious muggle university in computer science.

"We need Grath, now. Have him copy everything he can off of these." Norovosi spoke into the pin he was wearing. The stone magic in the gems connected to an identical pin back at the palace.

Grath arrived in minutes, Sierra followed him in and the two set up. The Unspeakables might have some good equipment, but the Ateres always had the best available. The two settled in and began, Grath going to work on the security programs and Sierra standing guard. Norovosi's team continued on.

-

Rahkesh dodged a series of bright blue spells and saw an opening. He called up a whip spell and cracked the red magical whip at Daray's exposed wing, the demon ducked and fell back, snarling, Rahkesh whacked Daray across the head. The demon swayed on his feet and rolled his eyes dramatically before he flopped to the ground and rolled onto his back, all four clawed feet in the air.

"Oh please, that bounced off your head scales." Rahkesh chuckled as the demon's eyes closed and his tongue lolled out, playing dead. Daray's red eyes snapped open.

"It did? I thought it missed."

"No it bounced off. Are you losing feeling or something?"

"Possibly, nerve ends closing down in preparation for molting/metamorphosis whatever you want to call it." Daray grouched, rolling back to his feet and stretching his wings. "And I'm feeling more and more restless, can't sleep, can't sit still, and my skin itches." The demon scratched behind one ear with his back claws and yawned. "Grandmother is still insisting she's not taking any chances by letting me work with the rest." It was hardly dawn but they had gotten up early to practice. Someone somewhere was doing some sort of magical ritual and anyone with a sensitive enough mind felt the effects. It was probably the Master of London, he had sent out a warning he was altering the wards around the Gathering Hall. The Gathering Hall was where the vampires in his territory would meet for anything that required voting (almost nothing, given that vampire society was not even remotely democratic), or for important announcements, or if someone challenged Lord Hadrian. Unfortunately the power behind whatever he was doing had woken everyone with any telepathic senses up hours before dawn, unless they had remembered to meditate a lot the night before. Rahkesh had not and neither had Daray. Since he couldn't go with the rest of the Ateres to begin their work in the Department of Mysteries, or the other group in Diagon Alley, he had joined Rahkesh for a very early morning duel.

"Be a bit of a problem if you started having seizures in Diagon Alley." Rahkesh said, Daray had been sulking all morning.

"Might be entertaining though." Daray replied. "Aunt Tashanna thinks that potion of hers will really work, for a bit. Once we see if it works I can join them, try some British blood." The last was said with a playful leer at Rahkesh.

"Better find someone who won't kick your arse for trying." Rahkesh sneered.

"Your mortal guest will do fine." Daray replied, referring to Draco who was probably still sleeping. "He's tasty, that aristocratic inbred bloodline. Good looking enough, if only he'd do something with that hair, wonder what he's like in bed?"

"Leave him alone, he'd probably wind up comatose." Rahkesh warned, hiding a wince and wondering how long he could keep Daray away from Draco.

"You're such a prude. But his blood's good enough for now. Got a rare dryness to it, perhaps insanity beginning from the inbreeding?"

Rahkesh fought the urge to laugh, the purebloods own rhetoric worked against them when faced with hunting vampires. Daray hadn't left the poor human alone since he arrived two days before. Rahkesh didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for Draco but Daray was like a cat with a mouse. He didn't just kill, he toyed with his food first. Of course he couldn't actually kill Draco, so he just toyed with him, never drinking enough of his blood to seriously weaken him, but enough that it kept him terrified.

"That one's enough of a mess already, you go and really push him over the edge and Mariah will eat _you._" Rahkesh warned. Actually he was hoping Daray would push Draco too far, and Draco would fight back. But so far he hadn't shown much resistance. Draco tried to avoid Daray, or at least keep from being alone with him, but he certainly couldn't run away. Mariah had magically tied him to the property and Daray was a vampire and Draco wasn't a particularly fast runner. Whatever seeker reflexes he'd had hadn't surfaced when trying to dodge the vampire's fangs. Rahkesh generally glared the vampire down when he attacked Draco while Rahkesh was around, but he'd never actually stopped him. Daray would find it suspicious if he didn't try to argue his treatment of the mortal, but he couldn't tell Daray his plan because then Daray would probably go overboard and really crush whatever was left of the temperamental fiery young man Rahkesh had known at Hogwarts.

"There isn't a chance in hell he's ever going to manage to get into Akren, and if Mariah thinks he can she's on drugs. He's a very clever chess player, but when all it takes is a glare from a vampire to get him cowering I doubt he'll make much of a research assistant either. Nah that one's just a particularly good tasting pretty slave." Daray sneered. Rahkesh privately agreed that Draco wasn't ever going to be Akren material. As far as Rahkesh could remember he was a bit of a coward. But he had his own opinions on recovering whatever backbone Draco had. And there was no denying that Draco _had _been intelligent, at one point in time. At Hogwarts before the war, at least in class he had been smart enough. He hadn't shown much of that yet, but it had only been two days. Though as Rahkesh recalled his attempts at plotting had been a bit pathetic, most of the time. And Mariah had to have learned something about him, probably by drinking his blood, to give her such a high opinion of the traumatized young wizard. Rahkesh couldn't quite figure it out, but he also hadn't gotten the chance to spend any time talking with Draco yet. Partly because he was a bit ambivalent concerning Draco and partly because he was working through the beginnings of two more bloodmagic rituals that he would need for necromancy training. One ritual applied only to his brain and was for stamina to allow an usually high level of brain activity for longer without headaches, the other would work with some mind magic routines to block out the effects of pheromones. There were several fae species, and veela, and vampires, who could consciously control their pheromones and Rahkesh didn't like the idea of being subconsciously influenced by them.

The sun rose and Daray transformed, the demon was more sensitive to the sun than the vampire was, though most of his bloodmagics transferred well. Sygra slid through the grass and wound around his leg, Rahkesh bent and picked her up.

_Draco is awake._ Sygra told him,_ he smells scared…and weak._ Sygra didn't like Draco's smell. And her other form wanted to eat him. Which meant that Rahkesh was living in a house with two predators and one prey, whose mind he was trying to reawaken.

_I don't want him knowing about your wyvern form._ Rahkesh warned Sygra as he headed inside, sending a telepathic signal to let Daray know that Draco was up.

_Very well. When we get back to Akren I'm going flying._

_So flying on your own is fine but brooksticks and flying carpets are out?_ Rahkesh chuckled, Sygra didn't answer.

Draco was in the dining room when they arrived, seeing the vampire he started backing away quickly. Daray changed course and Rahkesh noticed his step change as the vampire subconsciously prepared to attack. Rahkesh, quite deliberately, moved in front of the Daray, forcing him to step aside. Daray growled and turned away from the blond human and settled onto the couch. As soon as Rahkesh's back was turned Daray used a wandless summoning spell. Draco yelped and tried to struggle, unsuccessfully, as he slammed into the side of the couch. Daray already had his fangs in Draco's throat by the time Rahkesh had turned around.

"You get his blood all over the house you're cleaning it up." Rahkesh warned Daray, again. Every time he looked away for a second Daray was after Draco like a starving lion on a dying zebra. It wasn't news to Rahkesh that Daray was a bit of a sadist, or that he enjoyed frightening the life out of mortals, or that he liked fresh blood. And Daray knew it was annoying Rahkesh that he wouldn't leave Draco alone. "You're like a toddler you know, can't trust you with anything."

Daray pulled his fangs out of Draco's neck and licked the bite to close it. "I'm wounded, mortally wounded. It's a vampire's job to torture mortals, that's why we exist." From the ceiling fan Daray's giant vampire bat, Satan, squeaked his agreement. Daray, still holding Draco in place by the back of his neck, beckoned Satan down. The big bat landed on Draco's shoulder and bit at the base of his neck.

"You really are a repulsive creature." Rahkesh complained. He didn't mean it and Daray knew he didn't, so he ignored Rahkesh's complaint. Rahkesh growled and went into the kitchen to get breakfast…though Daray seamed intent on only blood today. Many months at Akren had certainly changed his view of the world. He'd gotten used to feeding vampires, and Daray generally made sure to keep any of his nastier tendencies away from his mortal friends. Certainly Satan feeding on a slave wasn't any stranger than Namach's extremely extensive and highly valuable prized blood collection. Just that a pet vampire bat named Satan still struck Rahkesh as being over-the-top cliché, and he was sure Daray didn't know the meaning of the word.

_Shall I eat the bat?_ Sygra asked from inside Rahkesh's sleeve. Rahkesh eyed Satan, and then decided he didn't need Draco hearing parseltongue. Leaving Daray and Draco (since he seemed to have lost this round) he went up stairs to his room.

_Better leave the bat for now. And Sygra, Draco shouldn't know I can speak to you. The other snakes have already hidden themselves, be careful please. _

_I know, snake speakers are rare. _Sygra agreed, _I'm going hunting._ She slid out the window onto a conveniently placed tree branch, and down to the ground. Rahkesh had transplanted the tree so that the snakes could get around easier. Sygra didn't like stairs much.

When Rahkesh got downstairs Daray was making pancakes, Rahkesh, seeing him about to add blood to the syrup, sent him out of the kitchen with a miniature thunderbolt. The vampire bolted as Rahkesh summoned the syrup away from him.

"That's disgusting."

"Have you ever _tried _blood syrup?"

"No. Aside from the horrible taste I don't want any diseases."

"The donor was healthy."

"Yeah, right. People who willingly give their blood to vampires are always healthy." Rahkesh grumbled. Even if they were physically healthy they'd still have to be barking mad. Daray stalked out of the kitchen and back into the sitting room. Rahkesh followed, and stopped short when he almost bumped into Daray.

The vampire was staring at Draco, who was lying on the couch, Daray's usual space, Rahkesh started snickering.

"That's my spot." Daray growled, ignoring Rahkesh, who was trying not to break a rib. "Get off."

Draco stared, Daray growled again, Draco went whiter than a ghost and fled, tripping over his own feet. Rahkesh intercepted him at the stairs and dragged him back in and sat him in the armchair.

"Actually it's my couch. And Draco, the last time he tried to chase me off it, I found that the threat of a castration spell can be an excellent deterrent." Rahkesh winked at Draco and turned, ignoring Daray's outraged look, and went back to the kitchen. Draco was still shaking, but Rahkesh had caught the look in his eyes. Draco had been considering Rahkesh's advice. That was the most sign of anything promising Rahkesh had seen yet. He was beginning to think about standing up to Daray. Perhaps he would, the sooner the better.

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Ok end of chapter two. Sorry it took so long, the internet hookup I had on vacation didn't like uploading stuff to I'm headed back to college soon so I'll be packing, can't promise how long the next one will take.

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After chapter one I got a lot of unhappy reviews from Draco haters, all I can say is stick with me here folks, I hate him too. He's here because I need him for something.

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Since somone asked, I do plan out the ending of my stories in advance. I do have a mental outline of all events and I know everything that is going to happen, I just have to write in all the filling. I've found that if I don't plan the ending before I start writing the beginning, then I never manage to finish. My best advice for new authors - imagine an ending, then write a story to lead to that ending.

To answer the other question, I may one day write and publish a few novels, in which case I'll be using ideas and personalities I've been trying out in this fic, so, naturally, all my fanfiction will be removed when and if I publish anything. I haven't published or written anything original yet, I have extensive plans for several novels, but it is unlikely that I'll ever get around to writing them. I'll let everyone know it advance if I'm about to stop writing this fic for any reason, unless I die or something.

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	3. Chapter 3

Many apologies for the late update, two weeks without a computer and a major scheduling crisis the first two weeks of school. Ack, why does the start of every semester have to be hell? Anyhow here's the next chapter.

Lucas13 – interesting, I hadn't noticed that…well it's Rahkesh that's going to save the world, with help. Lots of bloody battle ahead.

Fire and napalm – sort of. Saul's purpose hasn't finished yet. I had that whole thing with him for a _very_ specific reason. He existed for only one purpose that will become obvious very soon. Draco's not quite so specific.

Banner – aha! Finally someone asking about Dumbledore's tomb! Thank you. The tomb will be making an appearance, worry not. So will Narcissa.

Many, many thanks to everyone who reviewed, reviews keep me writing, that and the insomnia I get when I don't write.

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**Chapter 3** – In which old enemies return.

Drifting in an endless sea of calm, the sleep given by an hour of meditation, no dreams, just calm. Even his normally violent-enough-to-make-Satan-cry thunderbird animagus was calm here. Well what passed for calm, as in it wasn't roaring and hell-bent on single-handedly ending the world via electrical reversal of the rotation of the earth's core…or whatever it wanted to do with all that angry power. Rahkesh had taken to using meditation to help him sleep after gaining the form of the powerful bird. Without it he would never rest until he collapsed, driven by the thunderbird's endless fury to stay awake. Thunderbirds were not the most rational creatures; their absolute defiance of _everything_ went as far as their own body's need for rest. Perhaps that was why they were so rare.

Something tugged at the edge of his vision, pulling on his mind uncomfortably. Rahkesh checked and found no connection to Voldemort. The tugging continued and his sleeping mind slowly made the decision to follow; his instincts rarely led him wrong.

Screams, intense breathless endless screaming. Rahkesh snarled in his sleep, the thunderbird rocked and woke, ready to fight. The screaming was getting louder, and Rahkesh could hear the beat of wings. Fire raced across his vision and black smoke wafted through his nostrils. It hurt, the death stink on the hot air. Charred flesh and boiling blood.

A cobblestone street emerged, rivers of red blood running down the gutters, blood splashed across empty doorways and shattered windows. The homes were abandoned, a ghost town dripping blood from windowsills and gaping holes in burning rooftops. Blood on the tree trunks, blood smeared on doors and running down front steps, dripping from gutters and turning street-side flowerbeds into red squishy marshes. Bits of flesh, skin and intestines, were smeared over hedges and hung off railings. Claw marks raked down the sides of the buildings, huge gouges through the wood and stone. A human arm lay, detached from its owner, carelessly flung upon a staircase.

People were screaming, individuals now, shrieks of terror and the moans of the dying. He loved this, the blood, the rich stink of fear, bloodlust raced through his veins and he roared, calling his flock to another kill. Wait…he didn't like this…why was he feeling this way? These were not his feelings. He was watching through another person's emotions and eyes? That would involve a real connection…was he feeling these things from the magic surrounding him then?

The sky was red, red with fire and fear, and the flames reflected off the underside of the black clouds of smoke. The blood tasted good, smelled good too, he wanted more of it. No he didn't, the others did. Rahkesh fought to untangle his mind form what he was sensing, but collapsed under the overwhelming emotions and blood thirst, the drive to destroy and conquer that was so thick he felt like he was drowning in an ocean of war. Wings beat through the air and shrieks of triumph sounded overhead. Magic lashed out; flowing through the streets, the remaining windows shattered and the screams were engulfed in magic. Then they went silent.

The thunderbird screamed once a furious roar powerful enough that the visions napped and fell away as though shredded by great talons. Rahkesh's eyes snapped open and he leaped out of bed… and smashed head first into the wall. With a heavy thud he collapsed to the floor, pressing his palms over his eyes, then he blocked his ears and shook his head a little to clear it. Slowly the room stopped spinning; Rahkesh soothed the thunderbird into silence and opened his eyes. He had been sleeping, it was only a dream. But very, very, real…too real. It was no dream, it had happened, or would happen. Would happen, Rahkesh decided, the future. A future he knew? It seemed so familiar, the wings and the shrieks and roars and the fear of the vanished human occupants of the homes.

His nose was bleeding, and not from the impact with the wall. What had he seen? And why had it been so familiar? The magic felt…like something he knew, but had forgotten. Not Voldemort, something more, many creature's magic, but one dark bloodthirsty cruel power. He couldn't remember, he had known, in the dream, what it was, but he couldn't feel it now.

Rahkesh rose, steadying himself against the wall. He looked out the window, half expecting to see rivers of blood and a burning sky. Instead it was a nice day, blue sky, no clouds, sunny. What had he seen in his dreams and why did it frighten him so much more than any other fear he'd ever felt? Rahkesh dressed unsteadily and went downstairs, he wasn't hungry for breakfast, but he'd already slept in, and who knew what would happen to Draco if he left him alone with Daray too long.

XX

Daray was draped over the couch flipping through one of the vampire newspapers. Draco, having been banned by Daray from all of the seating, was currently on the floor by his feet. Apparently Daray had taken it upon himself to teach Draco proper manners, slaves did not sit with their superiors. Rahkesh hadn't thrown a fit, though he'd wanted to, because he was still hoping something Daray did would get a response from Draco. Draco had actually scowled at the vampire the day before. After Rahkesh had told Daray off for trying to steal his couch and the vampire decided to calm himself practicing spells on Draco.

"Some supporters of Voldemort attacked the Master of Paris last evening." Daray said, by way of greeting to Rahkesh who'd just woken up.

Rahkesh nodded, that wasn't what he'd seen, he just knew it, though he couldn't explain how. He paused and frowned at his friend, Daray seemed much more relaxed, physically. And he was in vampire form. But his magic, it was alive and humming with a suppressed excitement so strong it made his mind hurt.

"And?" Rahkesh asked, knowing it had to be something significant or Daray would have just told him. He leaned against the doorway, and closed down his own mind and blocked off Daray's magic. His friend seemed unaware. But Rahkesh felt like the room might spontaneously combust form the crackling burning magic that closed like frothing sea-spray around his friend. Draco felt it too. He was pale and shaken, his magic subdued and fearful, more so than usual, but he couldn't seem to pinpoint the source.

"He's built a new law of his own. Crimes against vampires fall under vampire law. Apparently a vampire died - a legally existing vampire that is. All the attackers captured - that's four wizards - will be providing a steady source of blood for his vampires."

"Aw crap. Public outrage amongst mortals starting as soon as the paper arrives." Rahkesh complained. "Did you figure out the problem with your next ritual?" He asked, changing the subject, Daray had pulled an all night work session. Being a vampire it didn't bother him much.

"Progress, but not fixed." Daray sighed, putting the paper aside and picking up the paper on the table. Draco, who had gotten used to watching them work on bloodmagic, watched with interest. The first interest he'd given to anything besides chess since arriving.

"You know I've been thinking all you might really need is a different knife. I know you've tried everything in the Akren bloodmagic armory and just about everything your family has, perhaps it's time to look further." Rahkesh suggested. The tingles from the magic Daray was giving off were waking the thunderbird and serpent, both of them were fighting to get free…and attack? Why would they attack? Yes the magic was very threatening, killing magic, hungry for slaughter, but it wasn't directed at him. Rahkesh shook his head and forced both away for the moment.

"What I need is a blade that will help me to channel the magic it takes in through my veins." Daray replied, he was working on a healing piece that dealt primarily with deadening magical curses that used a person's veins and arteries to go throughout the whole body. Rahkesh was doing the same set, his piece was written up, it would take him four knives, one of which he would have to customize. Akren had a few unspecialized knives students could temporarily customize for rituals.

"Electricity could be channeled through your blood, and if directed by magic could cover the whole body and finish binding the magic together." Rahkesh suggested. Daray looked over at him like he'd grown a second head. Rahkesh shrugged, he usually wound up using specialized knives containing in their hilts a phial filled with his thunderbird blood, charged with enough electricity to power a major city.

"Rahkesh, I hate to disillusion you, but electrocution doesn't solve all of life's problems." Daray said slowly, pityingly. Draco visibly bit back a chuckle. Ah, progress.

"It can, if you just allow it to." Rahkesh replied. It communed so well with magic…well that might just be him. Daray might be better off with demon vomit or something equally odd…Rahkesh tested the magic the vampire was giving off and decided not to suggest pixie dust.

"Uh huh Thunder, whatever. You'd love to see me fry myself wouldn't you?"

"Thunder?" Rahkesh asked incredulously, oh no, he _so _wasn't getting saddled with _that _for a nickname. They'd already tried that…and Rahkesh had only managed to veto it after a bloody knife fight with a laughing Silas. _Nuri _had laughed at him!

"Ally brought it up again."

"I'll kill her."

"She'll skin you then disembowel you with her fingernails, tear your eyes out and make you eat them." Daray chuckled. Rahkesh thought about that and grimaced, Ally _would _do it.

"I have a name, use it. No nicknames."

"What are you going to do about it? Besides it suits you."

"De-fang you. And it _doesn't _suit me."

"They'd just grow back, and it certainly does suit you, perfectly, oh thunderbird. Grandmother liked it, so did Namach, and no trying to intimidate Silas out of it this time."

"What the fuck?" Rahkesh barked furiously, "it's a conspiracy!"

Daray started laughing, Rahkesh flicked a flying bit of electricity at him from his wand, it bounced of Daray's shields and scorched the back of the couch. On some level Rahkesh knew he'd already lost, but he had to protest….Thunder? How _lame, _and pathetic.

XXX

What's bit your ass pup?" Remus chuckled as Rahkesh growled out a hello and brushed past him.

"My so-called friends coming up with ridiculous nicknames for me. Never ever trust a vampire Remus. They find the most horrible nicknames they can think of and never let you forget it."

"Go on." The werewolf said. Gleefully.

"Thunder." Rahkesh's scowl darkened when Remus laughed out loud and Moody grinning his twisted grin. Regulus chuckled and nodded approvingly.

"It fits you." Sirius's brother stated.

"Say it and die." Rahkesh threatened. "They tried this once already, last time I intimidated them out of it, this time Cyala's gone and agreed with them. I can't believe she did that, she knows I _hate_ that nickname."

"Better than Big Bird, Feathers, Giant Chicken...I can think of a hundred worse things." Remus pointed out.

"So can I, and Thunder is on the list. I _LIKE _my own name thanks. Do we have the list?" His partners had been building a list of places to look for the still missing locket. They had run down most of Mundungus's old clients, signatures were hard to fake and Mundungus, for all his rather lacking intelligence, had cast spells on his papers to record the magical signature of the signer. The spell had been poorly done. It was hard to trace amounts of magic that small but Regulus and Moody had managed it. There were still some who hadn't been checked and even the ones they'd found probably weren't telling the truth about no buying the locket.

"Yes. We really could use another good legillimens, slipping truth potions to all of them isn't easy. Moody can't really meet all of them; he's too obvious and noticeable." Shacklebolt said, "Was there any magical change in the cup?"

"No. It didn't react to the other horcrux's destruction at all. And Tristan Namach has agreed to help destroy it safely." Rahkesh told Moody. The old auror looked a little surprised. "I've got a plan, and it ties into a research project of his so of course he'd agree, just to see what happened and if it works like he thinks it will. If it doesn't work we'll try a second way, but we'll need a marked death eater to kill for that one. So I'd rather try the other method first." Moody nodded.

"That ancient is going to try to recruit you as an apprentice when you graduate." He told Rahkesh, who shrugged. Since learning he was the last horcrux he'd lost any expectation of living that long. "If necessary we can take Narcissa for the second method. You'll have to explain this to me later."

"Sure. Very basic bloodmagic actually. Or rather what not to do. I think the first method will work just fine." Rahkesh said, in fact he was almost sure it would. Namach had laughed hard when Rahkesh explained how he'd thought of it. A rather obvious, and still very clever, plan. The vampire had been very approving, it was something a vampire _would _naturally approve of.

With Nagini dead Rahkesh was rushing, feeling antsy and impatient to finish this. He couldn't really say why, but Voldemort _needed _to be gone as soon a possible. For a reason that had nothing to do with Rahkesh getting on with his life. If he had a life after this. But whatever happened it needed to be done soon…Rahkesh just wished he could have said definitely why. He hated premonitions with no explanation. It was one of the few things about magic that really did make him feel like the freak the Dursley's always claimed he was. Sensing what would happen. Yes it was beneficial, but at the same time he wished he wouldn't feel it. Once the horcruxes were gone hopefully the feelings would go away. There was only the cup, the locket, himself and Voldemort last. And Rahkesh had a method for dealing with the last two.

A two way killing curse would work perfectly if he could just create a magic channeling device capable of it. Not a wand, they worked in one direction. He would need something else. He would also need to attach a soul-removing binding to the device so that when it was used it would suck out of the soul of the user. Then he would activate it with that last bit of Voldemort's magic. It would remove the horcrux from him and Voldemort's soul, since it would be the same magic, the killing curses would then remove any chance of either piece getting into him or Voldemort. They were the only ones capable of containing each piece of soul, and if both were already dead then the soul would be instantly dead.

This would of course mean his death, but Rahkesh was working on that as well. He hadn't consulted with any of the Akren staff yet, but once he had the time he would. He'd cheated death once, and he wasn't so sure it had had anything to do with his mother's love. That idea seemed very unreasonable. After reading necromancy texts Rahkesh was wondering if perhaps Dumbledore hadn't been telling the truth, or had rather been saying what he wanted to be true. With all the energy of the killing curse there ought to be a way to avoid death. Use its energy against it. And his very very odd relationship with death gave him a good chance of working out a way around the dying part of his plan. Or better, _through _it. Why couldn't one go _through _death after all? Or bounce off the line between dead and living? Well, if necessary, he was prepared to go in with no plan and just wing it. That might mean sure death or a faint possibility of survival, but he had long since accepted that he would probably die finally destroying Voldemort.

The problem would be creating a magic channeling device, one with a soul removing binding to it. He had no idea how to do either. Fortunately he was going to the best place to learn it and had access to those who would know.

"How soon we can destroy the cup?" Shacklebolt asked.

"This month actually, the new moon." Rahkesh said, and everyone brightened considerably. Regulus rubbed his hands together and grinned.

"What needs to be done?"

"We need unicorn blood, willingly given to counteract the unwillingly given blood the cup has been washed in." Rahkesh said. Stolen unicorn blood was easy to detect; the leaves from his animus bacca plant wilted whenever they got too close to Hufflepuff's cup. "I've got some of it, probably enough. The real issue will be another sample of Voldemort's blood."

"Again?" Remus sighed.

"Yeah. But I'm working on that. I need you guys to start writing up a script for Xasseri, he's the snake who deserted Voldemort. And maybe find a way to create a likeness of him good enough to fool Voldemort, that Xasseri can control from a distance. He's got some nice fangs, if he can hit an artery we'll have all we need."

"We'll start working on it." Moody said, "Regulus you should probably work on that since you did know him."

"He won't have changed much." Regulus agreed. "If - "

BANG!

Something smashed into the door. War honed instincts flared and the five wizards whirled around and ran for the door, Rahkesh got there first, opening it he stopped abruptly enough that Remus had to dodge to avoid hitting him.

Daniel, werewolf Akren alumnus and healer, was lying in a pool of blood outside the door.

"Check the property." Rahkesh said immediately, Regulus and Shacklebolt stepped over the werewolf and moved around the corners of the house, wands out. Moody activated the wards magic and began checking it. Rahkesh let his thunderbird senses out a little bit, the air tingled and distant thunder rumbled, but he sensed nothing.

_There is no one_. Sygra informed him from a windowsill.

"He's clever, broke through the wards by channeling magic _into _them the way their creator would." Moody grunted. Remus levitated Daniel inside, Moody waved Rahkesh inside with him and limped out to the focus points the warded perimeter was attached to.

"Rahkesh, we're going to need some of those healing potions." Remus called, Rahkesh went into the dining room where Daniel was on the table.

Daniel was covered in deep gashes, and the jeweled hilt of knife stuck out of his side. Rahkesh removed his trunk from his earring and opened it.

"Find some blood clotting potion, a poison detector and an infection removal potion." He told Remus as he sliced off Daniel's robe with a knife to find the knife wound. Placing a hand on either side of the knife blade Rahkesh reached out, feeling for magic. There was none, the knife appeared unenchanted. But it could be poisoned. Remus poured a few drop of a poison detector onto the spot where the blade went into Daniel's flesh. It hissed and burned the skin, but didn't change color. Nothing, no poison, but the blade was silver. Silver and werewolves didn't mix. If left in place it might kill Daniel, depending upon what blades had made the other injuries.

Remus grabbed the knife and pulled it out smoothly. Rahkesh picked out his small phial of phoenix tars and tipped two drops into the wound. It healed over immediately and the rest of Daniel's wounds visibly mended a bit.

"The infection fighting potion Remus." Rahkesh said as he began casting spells to jump-start Daniel's werewolf healing capabilities, temporarily deadened by the silver. Remus picked out the potion and unscrewed the cap, it had a paintbrush attached to it and Remus began washing the worst of Daniel's injuries with it. Rahkesh found a general healing potion and a potion to transfer all of Daniel's available energy into healing. Mixing the two he used a charm to force Daniel to drink them as Remus put away the anti-infection potion. Daniel fell into a deep sleep as the potions took effect.

"I ought to contact his pack alpha." Remus said softly. Rahkesh shook his head, "I don't think he would be here if they were still alive."

Shacklebolt, Moody, and Regulus came back in. Moody made sure everyone was inside and went over to a blank section of wall. Rapping it with his walking stick the wall flipped around on hidden hinges to reveal a panel of muggle electronics. Moody tapped out a sequence on a computer screen and tiny green lights blinked on at each corner where the walls and ceiling or floor met. Next Moody pricked his finger and dripped a little blood into a tiny gold indentation. The walls came alive with magic wards of thread magic and Rahkesh felt wards outside activate invisibly.

"Isn't that illegal bloodmagic?" Rahkesh asked curiously – it had dragon blood mixed into it.

"Yeah well, after what happened a few years ago I told the Ministry to go to hell and made my own wards in our style. If they want to try to make an Akren alumnus abide by their ridiculous private property warding regulations…let them, anyone who tries will never win another election and will probably be executed by someone or other." Moody growled.

True enough, Rahkesh thought, he hadn't given any thought to Ministry regulations banning such extensive warding on private property when he'd warded his home. And if they bothered him…he'd use the Akren Alumni magical telepathic network to report it. Alumni would always step in to help each other against any outside force. Whoever bothered him would be dead or out of office in days. If Rahkesh didn't just kill them himself - he wouldn't stop at breaking almost any law to prevent any government from infringing upon what the graduates and students of Akren considered their rights. Even if he was opposed to murder in general this was different. You didn't mess with Akren. Ever. And no one was going to bother Moody anyway, they owed him too much.

Daniel's eyes fluttered, the air in the room began to move, coiling, straining, violent and desperate. Magic rose around them, cloaking the unconscious werewolf and snarling at the edges of their senses. Remus jumped out of his chair in panic and Moody leaped across the room, wooden leg and all, to press a knife against Daniel's throat. Werewolf magic was stirring, and it shouldn't be, not with those injuries and the potions. Rahkesh backed slowly away from Daniel and beckoned Remus closer. The magic lashed around, uncontrolled and ready to fight. With it flew a desperate tang that made Rahkesh's nostrils ache and his head spin. Too much magic, too much magic with purpose he couldn't grasp.

"Smell him." He said, to Remus and Regulus. _Sygra, smell him, what is going on?_ The black and silver snake slipped out of the shadows and coiled up the back of a chair. She really was getting a little too big to carry around his neck anymore. Fortunately she was very fast on her own.

"No harm, no reason to fear it. It's just the werewolf magic, it's trying to wake up…it needs something, urgently…some sort of terrifying purpose to its movements…" Remus trailed off and blinked. Regulus, now in fox form, was sitting on the table beside Daniel, finally he jumped to the floor and transformed.

"He needs to wake up. He's terrified, the magic is terrified, it must wake up, not to _do _anything exactly, it just needs to be awake."

Sygra twisted around to look at Rahkesh _wake him, do it now. His magic is screaming and his mind is crying, he must wake up." _

"The potions won't let him wake yet." Moody said, "got anything to reverse this?"

"Maybe, you'll have to restrain him, not magically." The other four each grabbed and limb and Sygra settled onto Daniel's chest, ready to inject paralysis venom if necessary.

Rahkesh opened his trunk again and began looking through it. Not finding what he needed he took out the other earring and enlarged it. In here were some of the potions and objects that he'd taken with him from his time with the Chachapoyaro, they had survived the time-travel intact and were still working. He picked out a bright blue snake-skin bag. Inside were several small globes filled with blue powder. Rahkesh conjured a flame and sprinkled the powder onto it, using a charm to waft the fumes under Daniel's nose.

Daniel's eyes rolled up in his head, then he shrieked. Rahkesh winced but kept waving the fumes under Daniel's nose as the werewolf screamed as if under the cruciatus curse and arched off the table, fighting against the four holding him down. Sparks flashed from his skin and his agonized screams rang off the walls. The screaming and seizures went on and on, five minutes, ten, fifteen, Daniel's throat tore and he began coughing up blood in between wrenching screams.

Finally he went rigid, his screams stopped and his eyes rolled around madly in his head. A high keening whine, not remotely human, stuttered out of his torn throat before he went limp.

Werewolf magic surged through the room, flinging Shacklebolt and Regulus off their feet and into the wall. Moody flinched, and backed off, letting go of Daniel's leg. The air temperature rose unbelievably fast and the table under Daniel began to smoke. Howling rang from the magic that soared through the house, howling from nonexistent throats and a thick scent with the sharp tang of blood and aggression seeped out of the magic.

"Remus." Rahkesh said, putting away the waking-fire, he didn't know what this was and couldn't help. Remus moved up beside Daniel's head and leaned down. He gritted his teeth against the frantic magic and began to growl, or hum, a low soothing sound with a vaguely threatening edge to it. Werewolf magic surged again, Remus this time, his wolf senses rising around the uncontrolled gale that was Daniel and calming him, drawing the magic back to his body.

"Wake up Daniel, you need to wake up." Remus spoke softly.

Daniel's eyes rolled around and focused, with a deep gasp he jerked up, Remus rocked back on his heel to avoid being hit. Daniel choked on his own blood, and rolled, vomiting. Rahkesh conjured fast and put a bucket on the floor. Daniel heavy, tears slipping from his eyes from the pain in his throat, when he finally stopped Rahkesh gave him some water, mixed with healing charms and potions. Daniel downed it all in one go, and then his body went rigid. He spun around on the table fast enough to startle Moody into drawing his wand.

"Demons." Daniel choked out, his eyes wide again and his scent going back to terrified. "Voldemort's summoned demons.

Moody reacted first, diving for the panel on the wall he punched in a series of keys and outside lights flashed and his wards flared visibly, before becoming invisible again. A heavy smell of air charred by magic wafted through the window.

"Daniel, you're sure?" Rahkesh asked, Daniel nodded, shaking.

"My pack was meeting, discussing where we'd be this month of the full moon. The demons attacked us at Relora's house. They tore the roof off, breathing fire and using their magic. There was acid flying everywhere. They got all the others. I was in the bathroom; I got out the back way and ran."

"Did they see you go?"

"They chased me for miles, I don't know how long. They caught me once, landed on my back, ripped me up with their claws. I escaped, on of them threw a knife while in flight, it was silver I think." Rahkesh nodded to the blade on the table, Daniel winced away from it. "They must have lost interest, eventually I realized they weren't behind me anymore. I saw the street signs and came here."

Daniel curled in on himself, trembling, he was crying now. Remus sat down beside him and wrapped an arm around him, and kept on his soothing growl.

"Rahkesh." Moody grunted, "we need to contact the alumni, all of them."

"Yes. In a moment." Rahkesh said, he was strangely calm, no panic, no fear. He had seen this then? Or something that still hadn't happened yet. He closed his eyes and searched out Daray. Daray was supposed to be at Lord Hadrian's manor with his family and Lord Hadrian's followers tonight. Rahkesh searched, calling to mind his friend's unique magic, the sound of the demon's roar, his image, and got nothing. He tried again, straining, his mind magic wasn't meant for this. Mortal humans didn't usually do this. And meeting the mind of the dead was difficult. He tried again, and failed, forcing his senses out further he sought a location, calling to mind an image of Hadrian's manor, the sound of Daray's voice, the smell of his blood, his magical signature, all his knowledge of the vampire's personality, slowly he caught a trail of thought.

_Rahkesh…?_

_Daray…Voldemort…he summoned demons…attacked Relora's werewolf pack, tell them, then get over here, quickly!_ Rahkesh forced all the urgency he could into the last thought, and felt Daray nod. Letting go of the temporary connection his groaned and collapsed to the floor, leaning against the wall. His head was pounding; he'd over reached himself telepathically.

"Shouldn't have done that." Moody muttered.

"Fastest way." Rahkesh replied. "Be here soon." He closed his eyes, which were aching and only seeing black as his magic sought to repair damaged brain cells, and leaned his head on his arms.

"Shacklebolt, call Tonks, and Bill and Charlie. Then get Tonks to the Ministry, she can claim she saw them. Get an alert out. I have Relora's address, send a team there at once." Moody instructed, seeing that Rahkesh wasn't moving. "Remus there's a guest bedroom in the back, get him back there and have him lie down."

Remus pulled Daniel to his feet and walked him out of the room. The werewolf was exhausted and shaken, but Rahkesh guessed he'd be back and ready to fight again soon enough. The loss of an entire pack was hard to take, but Daniel was a sturdy fellow, and he'd be out for revenge soon. And every werewolf alive wouldn't be far behind.

_Sygra, go outside, see if you can smell any demons, you remember what they smell like right?_ Rahkesh asked.

_Yes. I remember. You do have a mind healing potion in that trunk you know._ Sygra reminded him gently as she wrapped a coil around the door handle, and went out.

_Thank you Sygra._ Rahkesh whispered, Parseltongue not as difficult to manage as English. He'd forgotten. "Alastor there's a potion in there labeled with a blue wax seal of a brain centered on three interlocking circles, can you get it?"

Moody limped over to his second trunk and picked around inside, finally he just summoned it out and got a cup and handed Rahkesh both. Rahkesh, wand trembling, filled the cup halfway with water, then added ten drops of the black potion. Steam rose out of the cup, he waited until he felt the magical tingle telling him the steam had turned blue – he still couldn't see, then drank it. Relaxing his mental shields momentarily he felt the potion go about its work. It would heal most of the damage, but he would need to spend several hours in the meditation chambers at Akren sometime soon. Fortunately the school was open over the summer break.

It was several minutes until he could see again, and the pain in his head faded. When rose he felt his magic twist and lurch, still unsteady. Sygra appeared by his side and shook her head, no demons nearby. Daniel must have lost them a ways away. Or they'd been called off.

_Vampires._ Sygra warned as the door blew open. Her hood flared and she pulled herself three feet off the ground, glowing and hissing, stopping the vampires in their tracks. There was quite a crowd of them, but the glowing serpent didn't back down. Rahkesh would have laughed if the situation hadn't been so serious.

"About time Farov, Rahkesh do something about her." Moody growled, waving the vampires in. Rahkesh picked Sygra up, ignoring her hissing protest.

_Relax, they aren't the enemy._ He hissed softly, soft enough that hopefully the vampires wouldn't hear. Farov had brought a few others with him, none of whom knew, and Sierra and Daray.

"Sierra will take Daniel and Remus to the nearest werewolf pack for the night. We woke all of them so they'll be safe there. Daray use that invisibility potion and start checking the neighborhood." Farov said immediately, "Rahkesh can you go with him? You'll recognize demon sign right?"

"Yeah." Rahkesh said, he put both trunks back into his earrings and followed Daray outside. Daray had spread out a map on a lawn chair and was marking off where the werewolves had been attacked. Other markers showed where the other werewolves were.

"Right after I told them that the werewolves had been attacked Kylara arrived with reports from the same area of winged beasts flying around and burning houses. The area is entirely muggle so the Ministry has a lot of work to do." Daray said. "What happened to Daniel?"

"He got away, just barely. He was clawed up pretty badly. They chased him for a ways after he got out of the house, attacking him from above. They know about werewolves Daray, they put a silver knife in him." This knowledge of werewolves disturbed Rahkesh more than anything else. Demons shouldn't know that. As far as he was aware demons usually came to their world and didn't go back, so how would newly arrived demons know about werewolves and silver?

"How would they know about werewolves? It's been so long since they were last in this world…" Daray echoed his thoughts.

"Someone told them. Daniel said Voldemort summoned them." But somehow Rahkesh wasn't so sure about that. He didn't know why, but something here wasn't working. Why would Voldemort ally with demons, when they could probably outfight most of his already decimated forces? Surely he couldn't have rebuilt enough to that confident already. Summoning demons was such a risk, not a risk he was likely to take when so weak…

"Must be getting really desperate…ah Rahkesh…Sharahak?" Daray asked, Rahkesh froze, he hadn't thought of that. He took the other lawn chair and pulled out a knife, carefully he cut Sharahak's name, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, onto the back of his arm. Then he turned the knife blade flat and smeared the blood across all the hieroglyphs. Closing his eyes Rahkesh caught the binding magic in the bloodmagic he'd just done, and followed it. This was different enough from what he'd done earlier, reaching Daray's mind, that it didn't hurt, wouldn't unless he over extended himself. But he came up with an absolute blank, nonexistence but not dead, the same thing he'd been getting ever since he returned to his own time.

"No, nothing. I wish he were here though, he'd have a better idea of what's going on."

Sierra appeared outside the wards, carrying several phials. Apparently she'd escorted Daniel to the other werewolf pack's house.

"He any better?" Rahkesh asked.

"He's with his own kind. They're looking after him. And he's a healer, he'll get by. I got samples of blood from in the gashes, and from the house he was in." Sierra said. Rahkesh winced, he should have thought of that before healing them. "Can you tell what type of demon based on scent?" Sierra asked Daray.

"I don't know much about different demon types." Daray pointed out. "I'll need to compare them to myself, Sharahak, the demons we fought with the Chachapoyaro, and Namach's skeleton."

"Do that first then. I'll go tell Farov not to bother trying to find them tonight. There haven't been anymore reports. I don't doubt they're still in this world, but they've gone to ground." Sierra said.

"They'll be weak from the traveling between worlds so now is the time to go after them." Rahkesh disagreed.

"They erased all sign of where they went from the last place they were sighted at. A muggle there claimed they simply snapped out of existence, vanished. Kylara found portkey residue. A really powerful portkey, to transport five of them. Five that we know of." Sierra said, "they're long gone." She went into the house and Rahkesh heard her talking to Farov.

"Namach showed you his records on demons, was there any real mention of different types?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes, why?"

"Daniel had fang marks, I think, but no poison." Rahkesh said.

"Could be young demons."

"They're all poisonous, the demon whose body you have was young, though just about full grown. And Sharahak wasn't the same type of demon you were, I don't think."

"No," Daray agreed, "we did think of that, he wasn't. But we never really figured out what the difference were."

"We'll need all the records of demons we can get. I've got some of what the Chachapoyaro discovered form the bodies, copied their records. And our memories of the demons we fought. We can use a pensive to help isolate smells."

"And that skeleton Namach has. I don't suppose Namach would kill us for waking him right now." Daray mused, "all the same I'll have grandmother wake him."

"Probably already did." Rahkesh said. He looked back to the house as the door opened and the vampires came out, followed by Moody.

AAAARRRGGHH

Demons plummeted out of the air. An enormous dark brown and dark red one latched onto the back of one of the vampire's neck and ripped his head off with its jaws. The long spike of its tail took Farov through the chest, all the way through his chest and out his back. Snapping bone and his scream shocked everyone into motion.

Ribbons of blue fire flew from Sierra's wand ripping away flesh to expose bone. A dark grey demon flung out one wing, its wing claws ripped into Rahkesh's shoulder as he dove to the right. He spun away, landing on his back, and hurled three flesh-eating flame curses straight into its face. The demon leaped skyward with a scream. Recovering it attacked again with invisible air-removing curses leaving the mortals gasping in a vacuum. Then it opened its mouth and released a deadly silver vapor. Rahkesh sent banishing spells at the cloud. They sizzled out existence against the magic.

Sierra tackled the third demon, a smaller mottled brown and grey, hitting it from behind and throwing it to the ground. One of the vampires froze its wings and another snapped its spine. Sierra put a knife into the stomach of the one trying to fly away. Rahkesh got up and threw two throwing stars into its wings. Moody's rotting curse hit the gashes created by his knives, and getting past the scales, went into its blood.

The cloud hit them; Rahkesh began casting air clearing spells and called up a wind. From his right he saw Regulus stumble and fall. The cloud began to draw on him, pulling. Seeking out his magic then his life. Rahkesh stopped breathing and started searching the clouds magic. It felt charged…charged and prickly against his senses, not awake but energized. Finally he saw a weakness and called up the thunderbird.

Electricity flew from his hands overwhelming the magic the demon had given to its deadly breath. Crackling and pulsing like a living thing. The air stank of death and ozone. Rahkesh gathered the clouds magic into his own and hurled it all away from him. It shot skyward and began to dissipate.

And the demon hiding within dropped out of it. Rahkesh rolled backwards as it came down on his chest. Drawing a knife reflexively he put the knife into its guts and threw up a shield, stopping its jaws just barely short of his neck. He rammed a knee into it and twisted aside, feeling his flesh rip away from the claws that had hit his leg and side.

Rolling up he conjured, long silvers of metal, and used a banishing charm to drive them into the demons neck. Moving in the opposite direction of the protective hairs they bit into the scales, but didn't go through. Rahkesh pulled out acid and leaned forward. The demon rolled and turned, getting ready to breathe another cloud directly on him, or spit venom. Rahkesh poured the acid down its open mouth and leaped back. He landed heavily on his side and rolled away.

The demon gave a wrenching scream and jumped up into the air, and began to vomit. Black and fleshy colored vomit that sprayed across the creatures below, burning their skin and charring the grass. Moody tossed a heart crushing curse onto it.

The dark red and brown shook off the vampires and snapped out magic, flinging them around through the air. Shacklebolt drew a gun and emptied it into the demon's neck. The bullets didn't get far enough past the neck hairs to do any damage. Not deterred Shacklebolt attacked again with curses, ripping, cutting, and bone removal spells. One of the vampires hurled flaming spears of magic into its hide, where they disintegrated and exploded, ripping deep into its body. The demon surged skyward with a thrust of its back legs. It joined the screaming cursed one and sprayed healing magic across its wings.

Then a massive black demon dropped from the night sky, landing on the red and brown and crushing one of its horns with its jaws, the bone splintering under the powerful jaw muscles and weakening magic of the demon's saliva. Daray had arrived. His claws loosed their venoms and ripped into its shoulders and wings. As it spun aside Daray leaped free and attacked the grey. It put up a better fight, meeting his attack head on and ripped into Daray's shoulder. He twisted around and above, the grey raked its claws over his hip and tail. Daray dug his tail into its chest and curled over its back, snapping at its wings. The grey rolled and went for his stomach, Daray flipped aside. They met jaw to jaw then broke away, the grey biting into the joint where Daray's wing attached to his shoulder, Daray brought his back legs up and ripped the grey open all down its side, his claws finally catching on a rib and clawing around it until the back and front talons connected, gripping the rib bone and wrenching, breaking it and shaking the demon around by the shattered rib.

A crossbow bolt went into the wing joint of the red and brown. Spells from the group on the ground latched onto the barbed magical bolt and dragged the demon back to earth, screaming and fighting the whole way down. Curses tried to tear its limbs off. They were repelled by its thick magical scales, forcing the vampires to dodge their own rebounded spells. Changing tactics they went for weaker areas. Blinding spells removed it eyes and rupturing spells destroyed the internal organs. One of the vampires drew a long sword and took its head off. Brutal but very effective.

Ignoring the disassembling Rahkesh tossed a blood draining curse at the underside of the grey demon. Daray took its lack of concentration and fixed his fangs into its throat, closing its windpipe.

A sudden scream and burst of dark magic announced Satan's arrival. The magical vampire bat expanded to three times his normal size, black and red flames wrapped around his body and whips of dark magic flew from his wing tips. Joining his master Satan sent bits of magic into the grey demons ears, draining the magic in its brain. The grey demon spasmed and dropped from the air. Daray closed his wings and latched on. As the fell he turned his tail downward and settled his claws. His impact with the grey demon when they hit the ground drove his tail all the way through it and his claws deep into its vulnerable underside. Jumped back he turned away, unfurling his wings again. The demon on the ground began to glow as it rallied.

Then Sygra struck, digging her fangs into on of the wounds Daray's acidic claws had made she pumped her paralysis venom into it, followed by a neurotoxin to cause accelerated brain decay immediately. This was followed, just for good measure, by an all round poison to stop all bodily function necessary to life, like its heart.

The abrupt silence closed over the group, the fight finished as fast as it had begun. Two vampires were dead. Regulus was up again, looking bleary but awake, though weakened. Farov was on his feet, healed and alive. Rahkesh glanced around, finding Moody and Shacklebolt alive and well. Shacklebolt was scowling at the gun he was carrying and muttering about useless muggle technology.

"I thought the report said they'd left." Daray complained.

"It did. Five took a portkey to the devil knows where. And since there were only reports of five we assumed that was it. Where in hell did these three come from and where have they been hiding since their summoning?" Sierra growled furiously. The grey demon rattled out a death gasp, making everyone jump. Sierra leaped forward, pulling out a glass flower vase from somewhere and upending it over the demon's head. The pretty glass vase began to glow a sickly yellow-green and Rahkesh lurched as he felt it draining something. He closed down his senses and watched as the vase went black.

"Maybe we can get some answers from its soul." Sierra said with a nasty fanged grin.

"That came from the Department of Mysteries." Shacklebolt accused roughly.

"And?" Sierra asked, putting into a black pocket, the vase vanished, its bulk gone. How odd. He'd have to find out about these magical pockets, Rahkesh decided.

Shacklebolt glanced at Moody, who ignored him. Then he shrugged and didn't complain. It was too late to protest. If the Ministry only knew that the vampires had stolen a soul-catching device…oh the panic _that_ would cause. But the Unspeakables would never give the Ministry a list of what had gone missing. If they'd made one.

_They hid their scent. But now I know their magic for scent hiding. It won't work again. _Sygra said as she coiled up a drainpipe and wrapped around Rahkesh's neck. _There are no more. Pity. These were fun. _

"Sygra says it's safe." Rahkesh said, leaning his head to the side and closing his eyes, Sygra wasn't hissing anymore, and he acted like he listened to her thoughts. No need to tell any of the unknown vampires he was a parseltongue. They could probably find out from his Akren records, but why make it easy? "She knows what their scent-masking magic smells like now, and it's gone."

_They were weak, and none to healthy._ Sygra hissed as soon as the vampires had turned to their dead comrades. _They didn't smell healthy. And they smelled tired. _

_They must have been summoned very recently then. Still weak from the travel. Do you think these ones were full grown?_

_How would I know? It's unlikely that there are portals capable of summoning an adult. And if it could…their magic would destroy the portal faster wouldn't it? Then there'd be less coming through, even though they were adults. Quality or quantity. _Sygra said.

Satan returned to his usual size and settled onto Daray's shoulder. He squeaked a few times, then relaxed and lifted a wing to clean the underside of it. Daray purred and his neck spines relaxed, the spines on his back folded down. Those had grown, Rahkesh noted absently. More proof that Daray's demon form wasn't a full adult. And he was larger than two of the dead demons. Though the red and brown had had a good two feet more on each wing than he did. Maybe that one had been an adult? Or a different variety of demon. Satan rubbed his furred head against one of Daray's horns. The big black demon turned to lick at his wounds, then raised his head and looked around at Rahkesh.

"What was it Ally said about being jealous of us having all the fun vacations?" He asked.

-

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Haha, chapter three done.

Next chapter – destroying the Cup. Anyone caught on to what I'm doing with it?

Draco's fate.

Who summoned the demons.

The locket's location

Discussion on death and a preview of sorts of Rahkesh's unusual connection to it.

Maybe I'll get to Silas animagus form. One person guessed it so far, not telling who though.

Plans subject to change without notice. Don't complain if I decide to switch stuff around, thanks.

Please review! As always I really do appreciate it.


	4. Chapter 4

Hi, I haven't proofread this much. It was either not post for another week or edit more. So I went a posted it. Hope no one minds.

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Chapter 4

It was dark, so dark; he could see nothing, no light, just the dark, and the cold. They left him in the cell every night when they were done with him, and the cell was mostly underground and damp. The cold seeping through the walls had made him shiver in the beginning, now he was too tired to shiver. It was winter, and the cracks in the upper parts of the cell that let in tiny rays of light during the day also let the cold night air in. There was frost of the walls and ice crystals on the damp floor.

They had charmed him so that he would not die from the cold. He had no clothing but the charm kept him alive despite how much the cold hurt. It was different in the other rooms where they trained, where they tortured him, it was warm there. Almost enough to make him happy every morning, when they came just before dawn. Because it meant he would be warm soon. When the door opened and the warm air leaped in, it felt like heaven. But then the cruel hands reached in and dragged him out, and the heaven ended, replaced by hell. A hell with acids on his skin, weird experimental potions in his meager food, experimental curses driving him nearly insane while they laughed.

But he couldn't go insane, he'd been enchanted against it, there was no escape for his conscious mind from the unrelenting agony that consumed his days. The death eaters needed practice at torturing, someone needed to test the potions and the spells. The recruits had to learn to cast the cruciatus curse and imperius curse somehow. In the beginning it had been awful, waking up when the curses were removed and remembering whatever they had had him do under the imperius. It was usually something humiliating, they thought it was fun, brining down one of the Malfoys. And Draco felt like killing himself from the humiliation upon waking, but he'd been enchanted against that too. But after a while, when winter really set in, he stopped caring. At least it was warm and the imperius usually didn't hurt, at least not really bad. Not unless they had him hurt himself, or used it to make him fight some animal, that had been Bellatrix's favorite. But she had stopped coming a while ago. And the others had taken over, mostly doing the same thing. The rest of the time it was just embarrassing, enough to make him curl up on the floor crying, Malfoy dignity be damned.

The door was opening, warm light spilled in and he quickly shut his eyes to enjoy it, he only had a few seconds…then he felt a cold hand on his shoulder, which startled him, they usually wore gloves, he looked up, and saw a pair of fangs behind a cruel smile.

"We're practicing unforgivables?" The vampire asked someone behind him, while Draco nearly wet himself in fear and stopped breathing. Vampires. Good Merlin Voldemort had vampires helping him. Humans he'd been dealing with…but vampires? Finally his lungs protested and he gasped. "Well come on little mortal, lets see how well you scream." The vampire snarled, dragging him out of the cell by his hair. Draco heard giggles and glimpsed Pansy…his former friend…smirking and chattering softly with another vampire. _Just wait, _he thought to her _just wait until you are given an impossible task._ But she was doing well in the death eater ranks…being a slut could ensure that. And she'd never realize that she could end up like him until it was too late. Someone appeared with a needle and glass of a potion. They were always testing stuff, to see how it altered his experience of the unforgivables. Or whatever, half the time he didn't know what the potion did and couldn't figure it out, not that he cared anymore. He was warmer now, and now the room across the hall was opening, there was large group there today…and they were all vampires, and Draco was already thinking his cold cell sounded the better place to be.

Draco woke up screaming just as after the first curse was cast, as he did every morning since his arrival at the odd little house with the young vampire and the mortal sorcerer.

As usual Daray glanced up from his work, this time he was comparing diagrams of a demon dissection to the images of himself (taken with magic not knives).

"Do you think he screams like that during sex?" He asked curiously at Rahkesh, who was up earlier than usual.

"Do you always have to be so repulsive…and predictable?" Rahkesh retorted. The last part would be the most insulting of course. Actually he didn't really care anymore. There would have been a time when Daray's musing about Draco during sex, while the human was dreaming of being tortured, would have bothered him. But Harry Potter was long gone, consumed and burned to ash by his new personality. Rahkesh didn't care. Though he _would,_ and had, stopped Daray from actually going after Draco. He was certain getting Draco to snap out of it, even a little bit, could happen with Daray raping him…not the vampire would call it rape, and not that he would care if Rahkesh did call it that. And it didn't matter that after being bitten by a vampire Draco would probably enjoy it, it was the principle that mattered, and Rahkesh did actually have a few of those left. Sometimes.

The front door swung open, Nuri dropped down from leaning on the knob and pounced, across the room, knocking Daray off the couch and flat on his back. Silas strolled in seconds behind the cat. He and Rahkesh exchange grins over Daray and Nuri, who were wrestling around the floor as Daray tried to throw the big panther off him. Nuri always tackled one or the other of them, Rahkesh just laughed and scratched him behind the ears, but Daray found it embarrassing to be tossed around by a feline. He hadn't complained at all the last time Satan transformed and knocked him off his feet….apparently it was more respectable to be outdone by a magical vampire bat.

"Nuriiiii." Daray whined, trying to brush the panther aside as Nuri licked him once across the face, then curled up and lay down across his chest. "You aren't a little kitten anymore! OW! And you've got claws and you weight a ton… Aw _shit_."

With a sudden snarl Daray transformed, the demon not tolerating the cat, scales and black leathery skin sprang into being. Daray's skin rippled into the transformation and his joints snapped audibly before reforming. Wings leaped from his back and claws sprouted. Black lids snapped open from red/orange eyes, the spines around his neck stiffened and the razor sharp ridge on his back lifted. Nuri shot off him and leaped back across the room to Silas, who caught him and put him on the floor.

Daray wheeled around, wings arching upwards and snarling. Rahkesh reached out and firmly cuffed him across the head. Daray flung himself around with an unnatural roar, Rahkesh met eyes and gave him a bored look. There was pause, stretching on for several seconds, then Daray blinked. The scaled and spined head tilted to one side, studying Rahkesh. Rahkesh relaxed into his chair.

"There's a good little demon. Now transform back will you? Before you send out enough of a demonic signal to let everyone know you exist?" Daray had been giving off a continuous painfully loud (magically speaking) demonic signal. One that was completely out of control, his scales flickered, turning red then jet black. Tiny bits of magic lashed over the edges of his scales and gave rippled of dark magic to his skin. He was almost giving in to the transformation.

Realizing his friend was frozen, trying to contain the demon, Rahkesh looked over at Silas. Silas sighed and slowly, so as not to startle him, sat down beside Daray, dwarfed by the enormous black body. He settled down for a moment apparently unconcerned about the nearness of the huge fanged jaws that could crush his skull like an egg. He reached out a pulled Daray's head close, then looked him in the eyes and began projecting memories of being a vampire. With his other hand he made a tiny slit on his arm, letting the smell of blood fill the air, then he closed it, before the demon could latch on and lunge, but not before vampire instincts identified a family member.

Daray rippled, shivered, and his wings contorted in a manner that looked agonizing. Then he was back as a vampire, sprawled out on the floor. Nuri bounced back across the room and lay down beside him, sniffing him all over and, satisfied he was a vampire, began cleaning his tail. Daray rolled his eyes over to look at the big black cat.

"Something's going to give one day." He muttered to the other two. "The healers potions may have stabilized my blood chemistry, but the instincts are still there."

"You've just got to figure out what's supposed to happen. How about you take the day to work on that. Silas will start testing Draco on what curses he knows." Rahkesh suggested. He had asked Silas to come help with that, knowing Daray would probably eat Draco alive. Daray nodded and picked up the diagrams again, Nuri curled up beside him, making it plain he wasn't moving anytime soon. "And if you do transform uncontrollably, we'll just bring around some pixies to force you out of it." Rahkesh warned, more to the demon than Daray. Threats worked with demons. The furious glare Daray shot him made him decide that it was actually the best time to get going.

XX

"Good luck pup." Remus said, hugging Rahkesh around the shoulders. At least he hadn't called him Thunder, Rahkesh could deal with pup, that was just Remus being a typical werewolf. Heck _Daniel _had called him that when he'd fire-called to thank him. Apparently saving his life made Rahkesh his pack…but pup? Rahkesh was too old for that, but he hadn't complained, Daniel was still in bad shape. Rahkesh gently pulled free, waved to Regulus, who was going through massive boxes of jewelry purchased from a newly dead customer of Mundungus Fletcher. Regulus waved back and resumed his search for the locket. Rahkesh closed down the wards behind him as he left the house and headed for Diagon Alley. With the change in immigration customs everyone traveling internationally had to use flying carpets, no portkeys over borders or apparition. It was annoying and time consuming but Rahkesh wasn't going to make a scene. Most of the alumni had found ways around the anti-portkey wards on the borders, but Rahkesh wasn't good enough at making portkeys yet and he wasn't going through the trouble of getting someone else to make him one. Never mind the danger in using portkeys someone else made.

There weren't any hell's steeds at the entrance to the Akren Mountains so Rahkesh grabbed one of the portkeys and took it to the valley entrance, then a second portkey to the school. It was mid summer and the hottest time of the year…though that didn't mean much so high in the mountains the magical plants were responding to the time of year anyway. As he walked past the growling flame vomiting flowers near the doors he had to sidestep their flesh eating roots. Most of the year they were completely docile but midsummer woke them up and they could be very aggressive. A couple of red pixies sitting on the massive flowers raised their flaming wings and sent sparks and tiny whorls of flames at him when he got too close. The pixies would migrate all the way to the Hawaiian islands come winter, this time of year they were feeding on the sap of the thorny flaming plants.

An enormous snow leopard seated on a railing by the front entrance yowled softly at him in greeting. The Headmistress was standing beside it, working with pieces of golden thread to alter the school's wards. The threads shimmered and glowed in her fingers, whispering and twisting and chattering occasionally like a brook over rocks. The sounds communicated how well suited the knots were for her intentions. Rahkesh had no idea what they were saying, but the Headmistress seemed satisfied. She let the set go and it hissed and steamed as it melted into the stone, then vanished. Pulling at the air the Headmistress called out strands of magic and twinned them with more thread from a massive spool on the ground beside her. This time she cut both index fingers, so her blood would coat the knots and dry them in place.

"Good morning Rahkesh." Nvara Alefly said. She always spoke softly, but her voice magic capabilities were immense and so everyone could hear her anywhere. In fact her powers of voice magic were so strong it was sometimes physically painful to listen to her talk. Right now she was occupied with something else and so Rahkesh dulled his hearing to stop the ringing and throbbing in his inner ears and the snap of the thunderbird responding to such powerful magic.

"She looks a little disgruntled." Rahkesh replied, nodding to the snow leopard.

"Just had to clip her coat for the summer, it does get a bit hot here for her. She's vain, hates the way I cut her fur." The headmistress replied, shooting the ruffled looking cat a smirk, the snow leopard growled loudly and hissed, slowly rising to her feet.

_Big fangs, lots of claws, very powerful._ Sygra hissed in his ear. _Can we go in before we get eaten?_ Rahkesh gave the headmistress a quick bow and hurried in. He did not want to get caught in the middle of that fight.

Rahkesh secured his bundle under his arm again, leaving his hand free to wandlessly signal one of the massive redwood doors open. Moody would already be with professor Namach. Narcissa Malfoy was in a holding cell under Moody's house, just in case. Today they were going to destroy the horcrux residing in Hufflepuff's Cup. It was mid morning on a Saturday during summer break so most of Akren's students were away for the weekend or sleeping in. Namach had arranged things so they would have all of the bloodmagic chambers to themselves. Unfortunately the magic they were doing was soul magic and dangerous enough that professor Xanthius would be certain to sense it. Namach had avoided any conflict by inviting the elf professor to help before they even began. Being a researcher Xanthius had happily agreed to help, he'd never had the chance to closely observe the removal of a horcrux from a pre-enchanted object before.

"You're a disgrace to all bipedal life forms. Now get your silly little pointed ears _out _of my bloodmagic chambers." Namach's annoyed growl was audible all along the corridor.

"Don't you dare compare us with your inferior evolutionary line, _we, _my poor wretched bipedal friend, have _six_ limbs." A purring male voice snarked back at the vampire. That wasn't Xanthius or Moody. Damn nice voice though, more than a little hypnotic actually, and somehow the lethal magic in that voice frightened him more than even the demons did. Who else was here? No one else had been invited. Rahkesh considered leaving, but realized abruptly that whoever had spoken was probably another elf, and therefore probably knew he was here. Leaving wasn't an option.

"Only when you transform, I have six limbs when I transform, therefore you can't count animal forms." Namach argued. "And having six limbs still doesn't give you a right to my bloodmagic chambers."

Rahkesh gently pushed the door to Namach's rooms open and went in. Moody was sitting in the chair at Namach's desk and waved to him. Rahkesh went to stand near him and glanced around to see who else had showed up, uninvited.

_Three elves?_. Shit. Shit, shit, _shit._ Were they here about the demons? Rahkesh started panicking. Then stopped just as quickly. No fear, display no fear, ever. These creatures would smell it if he was at all frightened or hiding something. So he'd just pretend he wasn't. It was a trick he'd learned when dealing with older werewolf students, make yourself think you're safe and your smell will adjust to follow. Rahkesh went back to calm-but-wary so fast he was sure his smell hadn't changed, even for a second. And no one seemed to notice if it had.

Xanthius, white hair and weird purple and green eyes, was lounging on the couch. Behind the couch was a tall female elf, wearing armor. Dark green leather and bloodmetal armor, she was also carrying enough weapons to build her own armory. Throwing stars, knives, a set of twin swords, a crossbow, and a series of unusual slim curving blades the like of which he'd never seen before. She turned and looked at Rahkesh and smiled a little as his mental wards solidified and added on layers and layers of memories of the cruciatus curse and other extremely painful memories to hit anyone who tried to read his thoughts. Her eyes were red and yellow, going well with the red/gold hair. The most identifiable trait of an elf was the eyes – their eyes couldn't be disguised. Creepy, really creepy. And Rahkesh had though Madam Hooch had creepy eyes.

Namach was standing across the sitting room from the couch, against a bookshelf which, when turned around, could be pushed back into the wall to reveal a fireplace behind it. He was absently rubbing Eli's head scales, which were standing on end as the magical frill-neck growled. The big vampire was radiating suppressed power and the usual dark vibes swirling around him had increased enough to make Rahkesh's skin tingle. That sort of power could drown you…actually any muggle would have been half mad already. And anyone untrained some basic mind defenses or unused to vampires would have been in serious trouble just being in the same room with him. Rahkesh however had gotten very used to this and built up plenty of defenses against the vampiric powers always seeping around Akren. He never would have made it through Namach's class with his mind intact otherwise. Moody seemed to be doing fine as well. His mind blocking out everything, and have long since built up an almost immunity to the sort of undirected power Namach was giving off. Rahkesh had feeling that if that magic had actually been directed at him or Moody they'd have been in serious trouble. Fortunately Namach's attention was elsewhere. Both vampire and reptile were glaring at the third elf, which was leaning against one of the ancient columns. Taller even than Xanthius, with gold hair to his waist and a long black and gold cloak, he was also in armor, also dark green and bloodmetal. The plants hanging from the columns were actively twining themselves through his hair and glowing. Rahkesh guessed it was he Namach had been arguing with.

The two unknown elves projected and air of extreme violence. _Predators _Rahkesh's magical senses warned. Much more so than Xanthius, who was a skilled fighter, but also a researcher. At least Rahkesh had thought Xanthius a good fighter, he was one of the few Namach regularly sparred with, but comparing Xanthius to these two was like comparing a butterfly to an eagle. The female was taller than Xanthius, and broader with a great deal more muscle. The male was even taller than she and, for all that he appeared light and graceful, also seemed to built out of titanium with a physique that would have impressed Daray's father. These two were professional killers; Rahkesh could feel the unconscious growling and fury vibrating from their magic. But it was a violence hidden by equally extreme grace and beauty. While Namach was wrapped in a shroud of dangerous seductive darkness and seemingly endless suppressed violence these two elves projected a far more frightening aura of certain death mixed with enough exotic danger and absolute power to outshine even the oldest of vampires. Rahkesh could see why Moody had chosen a seat a bit away from the four immortals, to be too close right now, while they were arguing, might well have drowned him in their power.

Eli turned his head around and saw Rahkesh, with a sharp hiss his whole body rotated and his frill flared out a bit. Namach looked around, saw it was Rahkesh Eli was hissing at, and sighed irritably.

"Eli, really. Exactly what has he ever done to you?" The big lizard smacked Namach in the gut with his heavy spiked tail. Namach didn't even flinch, just grabbed Eli by his tail and picked him up, dragging the lizard outside onto his balcony. Eli's claws raked gouges into the floor the whole way. Namach dropped him none to gently onto a spot on sunlight. Eli turned on him, screaming at the indignity of being _dragged _around. The elves chuckled at the lizard's outrage. "Take a nap." Namach ordered, then came back in, Eli, now in sunlight, completely forgot about Rahkesh and stretched out to bask.

"I'll have to try that with my familiar sometime." Rahkesh said as Namach firmly closed the balcony doors behind him. Sygra, over his shoulders and neck today, despite her size, leaned around and hissed at the elves, scenting the air. The armor-clad male elf peered curiously at Sygra, then held out a hand to let her smell his fingertips. If the female elf's eyes had been creepy this one was down right scary. Neon glowing green (even more so than Rahkesh's killing-curse-like eyes). With a strange gleam to them that looked more like what Rahkesh would expect to see on a basilisk or dragon. This elf possessed the capability to kill with his eyes, Rahkesh realized abruptly, putting both him and the unknown female into the list of beings to avoid offending at almost any cost.

"Amazing," The female elf murmured, she was staring at Sygra with unconcealed shock. "I never though to see a _black _one of _those_, where did you get her from?"

"A pet shop, in Diagon Alley, London. You have seen her like before?" Rahkesh asked. The blond male looked up and stared at him. Rahkesh avoided his eyes and promptly settled his body just a bit more into a slightly less threatening stance. He was getting vibes that this one was even more likely to attack with virtually no provocation than most vampires were. What was it with magical begins like elves and vampires that made them all have such outrageously violent reactions to just about everything? Meeting these two Rahkesh would not be surprised if their culture was organized in a structure not unlike that of the vampires or a werewolf pack, and about as violent.

"Seen them? Yes of course. We created them…you don't what she is do you?" It was the female elf that answered, since her fellow warrior seemed more intent on deciding how best to take apart Rahkesh should he make any move with the slightest sign of aggression.

"I have a suspicion, but I can't confirm it." Rahkesh said carefully. Inwardly he was cursing. Created them? They had better not want their creation _back._

"What do you think she is?" The female asked with a smile, Rahkesh wasn't fooled. They could act friendly all they wanted but he could feel their lethal capabilities that made his thunderbird look like an amateur at destruction.

"The theoretical fourth Basilisk." Rahkesh finally said. What the hell, maybe he was wrong, but he doubted it. It was the only type of snake his parseltongue magic had no knowledge of.

"Very good." The female elf agreed with a nod, "A very young specimen, has she transformed yet?"

"Yes." Rahkesh answered. He opened his mind to Sygra, letting her hear their conversation. Sygra whipped around the stare at him and he sensed his familiar's disbelief. _Yes, very true Sygra, I have been thinking it for months. You are the fourth Basilisk._ Sygra flicked her tongue twice as she thought, then she practically smirked.

_Well, well, that is nice. Queen of serpents…hmmm…I could get used to that._

"You speak Parseltongue, very fluently." Xanthius murmured, observing Sygra talking to Rahkesh. Apparently he hadn't known.

"Yes I do." Rahkesh admitted. Waiting, but none of the elves reacted to that.

"I don't recall the records ever showing a mention of black one." The female elf said slowly, "they're supposed to be very specific. Was she black when you got her?"

"Yes, same as she is now."

"You can communicate a little telepathically?"

"Yes. Mostly we just use parseltongue though." Rahkesh said. The elves exchanged looks, then the female shrugged.

"Well it had been many years since we let them loose to live on their own, perhaps a thousand generations. Thy may have changed since their creation. Could I take a blood sample some time?" The last question was directed to Sygra, and Rahkesh realized with a start that Sygra could understand her, in English. That must be some sort of elf magic. Sygra hissed an agreement, and the female elf nodded, understanding. It wasn't parseltongue; Rahkesh would have sensed that, but perhaps merely an ability to communicate with animals? He needed to learn more about elves.

"Change of plans?" Rahkesh asked Namach. The ancient's eyes flicked over to the two uninvited elves. The female glared steadily at Namach, and waves of power began to shift and swirl about her companion.

"Tree-hugging pointy-eared parasites are interested in observing this." Namach finally said. The female growled like some great beast, the other one chuckled.

"The blood-drinking walking corpse is calling elves parasites?" He asked, Namach sneered at him. Sensing trouble Rahkesh looked over the two and decided that having them present wasn't any worse than having Xanthius around.

"If they don't interfere." He said shortly. The male elf turned, and how he'd started growling too. Perhaps he shouldn't have used that tone of voice. Rahkesh avoided his eyes and a little of the thunderbird slid through. A distant rumble and the air shifted again, Rahkesh felt as if crackling razor edged feather were wrapped around him. The elf rotated fully and looked at him carefully. Rahkesh curled the hand hidden in his cloak, pressing the needle attached to the ring he was wearing into his palm, injecting the potion. It was something he had found in the Potter vaults and which he had thought to use if the magics destroying the cup transferred from Voldemort to him. It could only be used after enough power had been fed to it, but he'd had it with him all week. And before that it had had nearly two hundred years to rest and let the magics working it repair themselves. He could use it four more times today. The potion surged through his veins and Rahkesh called it to his brain, blocking out his entire mind, everything…but the soul of the thunderbird, then he met the elf's eyes.

Immediately the elf's magic flooded him, invisible and almost impossible to sense, but for the fact that the magic was streaming into empty space rather than thought. Rahkesh grimly waited while it aligned with his soul. The thunderbird reared up, lightning arced across the sky and a wind sprang up in the room. Electricity crackled in waves over Rahkesh's body and the thunderbird roared across all their minds, wings unfurled, made of invisible magic. Waves pounded at all of them, like sound waves but with no audible sound. Rahkesh felt the elf lock out the thunderbird's magic and seek out its soul. A question crossed his thoughts, flying from the elf to the thunderbird that currently controlled Rahkesh's magic and body.

_What does defeat mean to you?_ An unusual choice…and he must have known the answer, Rahkesh couldn't think of how he wouldn't.

_Nothing. It will never come._ The thunderbird's answer slammed back, bolts of lightning flying away from Rahkesh in all directions, the sky turned black and the thunderbirds presence filled the air with the sound of feathers and the roll of his terrible cries. _Never. Death before defeat. You can kill me, destroy my soul, destroy my magic, but you cannot defeat me. I don't bend or break. I end, if I meet a foe capable of it. Victory is in forcing the opponent to back down. I do not. Even dead my soul and magic continue. Even without a soul my magic still continues to destroy that which destroyed me. And you may destroy my magic, but not before I destroy everything of this world that I can…including your magic and soul. There is no defeat. _

Rahkesh relaxed, and let the thunderbird take full control. Telepathic talons lashed out ripping and tearing a razor beak snapped and wings edged with feathers as hard and sharp as bloodmetal blades. The thunderbird's fury went crashing through the room, Moody collapsed off the chair and Eli screamed. Endless rage. Hell bent on destruction.

And something answered, a deep power flamed up from the elf's soul, blocking the thunderbird. Roaring and crashing flames and death and an endless well of destruction powerful enough to block off the thunderbird's mental and magical attack while the elf left Rahkesh's mind and returned to his own. Rahkesh closed off his mind again behind thick walls, imagining a fortress armed with cruciatus curses and the thunderbird's fury and power and the basilisks venom. Only when he was sure he was secure did he uncurl his hand, pulling the needle out of his flesh.

For all the magic that had just been used Namach's rooms showed not the slightest damage. The bloodmagic that enchanted these rooms was so strong and thick that the walls of stone didn't actually exist any longer, the bloodmagic had replaced them. The endless runes had eroded out the rock and filled its spot with the ancient vampire's power. The protection extended to every nonliving thing in the rooms, and so nothing was harmed.

Rahkesh calmed the thunderbird, but this time it needed no calming, he and it were getting along much better these days and it folded its wings and sank back into his subconscious easily enough. Rahkesh briefly accessed its magic for whatever impressions the elf it may have formed.

An image flashed across his mind with such clarity and violence that Rahkesh stopped breathing. An immense flame-wrapped black, gold and red dragon roared back out of where the elf's soul should have been. Shiny scaled black wings edged in red and gold in fiery patterns like a wildfire. Black scales and talons. Black fire swirled from slit nostrils and black acidic venom flew form fangs with a rush of flame. Lethal soul-killing black magic roared over the beast, fueling a cloak of flames. A Death Dragon.

That explained a lot. The elf was a Death Dragon, and from the thunderbirds senses Rahkesh felt that the female elf was as well. So the elf warriors were Death Dragons. No wonder they were so fearsome. Death Dragons were a species that had only briefly existed, within a few generations they had gone so far that their souls couldn't stand their own existence and they had, in their endless seething rage, self destructed. They'd taken all life on earth with them in the worst extinction of all time. All life. Everything had had to begin anew and it had taken over a billion years for life to begin to form again. So long ago that nothing remained to show it had ever happened. Which meant elves, not native to earth, had been around during that time. Okay _that _was impressive. Rahkesh knew those records, he'd read up on all creatures that seemed to be a bit like the thunderbird, mentally. It appeared these creatures had him beat in sheer lethalness…but he'd bet the thunderbird was much more stubborn, dragon after all worked in an actual hierarchal society, thunderbirds could hardly handle each other's presence long enough to mate, and usually one wound up dead, the reason for their scarcity.

Coming back to reality Rahkesh looked around to make sure Moody was all right. The one eyed ex-auror was back in his seat and looking calm enough. Though he was grinning in his wrenching fashion and seemed quite pleased with something or other. Rahkesh looked back around at the elves. Namach gave him a fanged grin, apparently he was pleased as well.

The two new elves traded looks briefly. The female looked back over at Rahkesh curiously.

"You have more than one magical animagus, what is the other?"

"You are welcome to observe so long as you don't interrupt. The chambers are awfully temperamental and I don't fancy being ripped apart because you started using magic on them." Rahkesh said, not responding to the question.

"He's far to bold. Xanthius you're supposed to be keeping the lot of them under control." She complained. Xanthius was eyeing Rahkesh, then his kin, with a great deal of amusement. Namach laughed, breaking the tension.

"Easy Ryavar," he said gently, "kid's got some fine talons." The female elf, Ryavar, shot Namach an annoyed look. Rahkesh fumed and glared at the ancient vampire. He didn't need a couple of elves killing him because they thought he might put up enough of a fight to be fun. Ryavar's power flared and a deep growling sound filled her magic, Rahkesh closed down on his magical senses to verify that the sound was not audible to his ears, only his mind. It sounded a good deal nastier than Namach's Ice Dragon. "Ferraidar would you do something about her?" Namach asked, exasperated. The other elf, Farraidar, shrugged.

"No. We'll have to see just what the mortal can do later. Right now I'd like to see this soul decaying magic you've worked out. Relax little mortal, we wont interfere."

Rahkesh followed Moody out of the room, seething. Okay so the elves were about a foot taller than he was, and he would be considered tall for a mortal, really "little mortal?". Moody was very obviously trying not to laugh. Behind them the three elves were bickering in their own language, Namach was apparently listening and seemed to be agreeing with whatever Ferraidar was saying against the other two. Well, at least they didn't appear to know about the demons. Though they undoubtedly would shortly. Then of course he'd be in for more questioning. Rahkesh's blood went just a bit cold at the thought. Would they blame Daray? He'd had nothing to do with it but they might get rid of him anyway…too much of a risk and all that. He hoped they were just visiting for this soul-killing, then they'd be gone again to wherever they'd come from. Te world did not need the elves involved right now.

"Some display back there."

"My animagus and I have an arrangement. It works most of the time…you'd think, it being a physical and magical manifestation of my soul it would be easier to manage."

"No, I wouldn't. I'm surprised it isn't worse. After all if you refuse to back down on anything major why would the creature that reflects your soul do so?" Moody said. Well he had a point, Rahkesh admitted, his own defiance made things more difficult for himself. Well, he wasn't changing any time soon. "So you've really got Malfoy living with you?" Moody asked, watching from the doorway while Rahkesh did a quick examination of the chamber.

It was the most magnificent bloodmagic chamber he'd ever seen. Namach controlled its use strictly, easy to understand, since it was more a work of art than anything else. A full sized griffin skull stood out above the door facing the hallway, away from it curled wave after wave of runic magic. Inside the floor was a roiling mass of swirling black and white marble, a solid piece almost as large as the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch. Heavy ornate carvings wrapped up the black and white marble pillars that stood against the walls. The ceiling was gilded with many-colored gem stones in stone magic. Slices of gems thinner than a fingernail put together like an enormous mosaic. The image was flames, rainbow fire exploding outward from the center of the domed ceiling. Around the room where the pillars ended and the dome began was the full skeleton of a basilisk, fangs set into its own vertebrae near the tail to hold it in place.

Namach had thought this room's snake magics would be helpful for the purposes Rahkesh intended. It was chamber meant for bloodmagics related to necromancy and soul magic. This was a place for destructive magic only though, there was another room for nicer stuff and a third for intermediate purposes. The Basilisk had been driven insane, with anger, before it was killed. Whatever presence remained was entirely destructive. Rahkesh purred at the feel of what little magic of the basilisk remained, it had been killed in its current position, and rotted there over the centuries. Yes, this would suit his need perfectly.

"Yes." Rahkesh answered, "I don't think I've ever seen anyone so timid. But I think he's still got that old fire. And perhaps more of a backbone than I remember, he's been through a lot. I'm hoping Daray will push him too far and the old Draco Malfoy will wake up."

"Push him too far…as in bite him or rape him?"

"No idea. He's been drinking Draco's blood all week without much fuss. He's also been testing a few wandless curses on him. Draco's starting to show signs of irritation."

"You think its safe to leave Malfoy in Daray's care for the day?" Moody asked, as if he might be seriously questioning Rahkesh's sanity. He had never met Daray himself, but he had heard enough from Rahkesh and probably knew the type from his own time at Akren.

"No. Not at all. Silas is with them."

"Uh huh. So instead it'll be a three-way and Malfoy will still have no chance." Moody muttered. "They're vampires, addicted to blood and sex, remember?" He pointed out at Rahkesh's annoyed look.

"I don't think Silas would ever go for that, which is why I invited him over. Daray…thinks Malfoy would make a nice pet. Silas is supposed to be drilling Malfoy on what curses he knows while Daray's busy planning with Sierra for most of the day. Perhaps practicing hexes will get Draco to start fighting back the next time Daray rips his throat open."

Moody just hummed and shook his head and Rahkesh went back to work. Was he the only one besides Mariah who thought Draco might actually have a little spine left? It seemed that way.

With Namach's direction Rahkesh began the bloodmagic, drawing a careful set of spirals in his blood on the floor. During an actual working ritual the user's magic flowed out through the runes, the number of runes in part setting the pace for how fast it went while the complexity began forming the interlocking layers that would settle into the cuts on the users skin. Specific runes for different parts. The flow of magic could be speeded up or slowed down depending upon the depth of the cut and whether or not it was a focus point for activating the magic. The flow had to be continuous with no breaks, and tightly contained. The magic's movement through the drawn runes reflected the magic in the body when it was in use and greater complexity allowed for more depth through the mind and soul. Namach directed Rahkesh to deliberately botch some points, making corners sharp when they ought to have been smooth, and changing from a four point form – one for each limb- to a three point like the type used in some soul magics. The pattern was meant for the physical, to allow a necromancer to reach into their soul and measure what the connectivity was between death, life, and the space between. But with the improperly done set it would force a completely loss of the soul through a hole in the magics, like water slipping out of a crack in a bucket. At the same time the remainder would fluctuate between death and life so wildly that it would break down while still attached. The result would be that the soul would completely dissipate into nothing as it slipped out.

The methodology was a joint creation of Xanthius's and Namach's. They had been practicing methods for implanting it into a persons' soul and then activating it years later. Saul had been one of their experiments, and the one that had finally resulted in the break through that allowed a time delay. Long enough for Rahkesh to get out of the chamber and disengage the part of the runes bound to him.

Finishing with the part done in his blood Rahkesh began on the part done with Voldemort's blood. His team had been very clever about this. Remus had called on several werewolf packs and talked them into helping him plant explosives around one of the death eater's safe houses in London. Voldemort's stronghold had been too well protected to attack at that time, but the safe house's wards had been improperly done and a an Akren alumni group in Ireland had sent an expert to help Moody slip through the holes unnoticed. They had then held the wards immobile while the werewolves went in.

Then Xasseri had been sent back to Voldemort with the location of the traitorous Siraka. Faked, but reasonable enough, as the location Voldemort had been given was very close to where he was searching for one of the hidden Potter Estates. During Xasseri's meeting with Voldemort Remus had remote detonated the explosives, setting off alarms in Voldemort's underground stronghold. Voldemort had leaped off his chair at the alarm and Xasseri had bitten himself, letting his blood (altered by a potion) drip onto the focal point for one of the wards. The ward had reacted to Harry's blood in the potion and flared madly, the pain sending Voldemort staggering. Xasseri had bitten him then; his fangs enchanted by Regulus to extend unnaturally long, and had ripped an artery. Voldemort's blood had spilled all over Xasseri, whose scales were altered to act like a sponge. Xasseri had fled after splashing more of his blood across a second ward focus point, disrupting them and stopping Voldemort and everyone else long enough to get away.

Xasseri had returned with enough blood for what they needed. He had then taken up residence at one of Rahkesh's homes, guarding the Dyalnos tree while Rahkesh was away at another property with Draco and Daray.

Moody joined the three elves at the observation window, watching as Rahkesh placed the cup in the center of the patterns and dripped a little of Voldemort's blood into it.

"Ready." He said to Namach, who was levitating Voldemort's blood into the correct runes wandlessly. They had decided Namach should do this part, given that he knew what the magic was supposed to feel like better than Rahkesh did. But already the latent inactive magic in the room was setting Rahkesh's teeth on edge and jarring his mind like a file down a blackboard. Wrong, wrong, wrong, it screamed at him, and a faint pull had begun, like it wasn't connected right and was starting to drain. The air didn't feel right, clammy and thick. His nose was itching and the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

"Place the cup then. Activate it and get out of the pattern, but stay in the chamber, it'll need a living connection for the separation part. Even if you're not the soul's originator." Namach said. Rahkesh put the cup into the center and levitated the ends fo the blood runes to wrap around it. He was a bit worried about what affect this would have on the part of Voldemort's soul he carried. But he wasn't actually doing the destroying, mixed up magic with Voldemort's blood was. This disconnected Rahkesh enough that there shouldn't be a backlash. The reason he'd had a bit of trouble had partially been because he was casting the curse to destroy her. This time Voldemort was effectively doing it to himself, even though he had no control over it.

With the cup in position Namach left to the window as well. Rahkesh knelt in the center beside the cup and placed his left hand palm down over it. With his other hand he picked up a very long very thin knife made of a basilisk fang. It had no venom left, but it had some magic, and it was Voldemort's species of basilisk. This would also help to distance Rahkesh. Rahkesh then closed his eyes and began to meditate. This was the part he'd been worried about the elves interfering with, if they wanted to "watch" telepathically it would disrupt what he was trying to do.

Slowly he caught the flicker of foreign power that encased the piece of Voldemort's soul. Rahkesh had it encased in a metal ball with inward facing spikes, telepathic not physical. And bits of memories of the shock of the Amadan's curse. The soul was slowly being tortured by it; Voldemort had to be feeling a bit ill, wherever he was. But he would be unable to contact this broken piece and find out why. All he'd feel was ill health, no problems with his soul at all. It would make this section of soul easier to remove in the end, but for now it also contained it. Now Rahkesh teased a bit of power form the slimy covering, and locked it apart. His scar hurt horribly, but he ignored it. Drawing the bit of magic out into his palm Rahkesh called up the magics he used to remove poisons, and slit open the exit portal in his wrist.

Rahkesh felt the tiny bit of magic leave his wrist, leaving him double over, holding his arm and nearly screaming in pain. He imagined getting his hand _burned _off with one of professor Strawlime's creations would hurt less. But finally the last of the magic dripped out into the cup and Rahkesh's wrist closed. Now he quickly levitated the strands of blood from the floor and tossed them into the cup, then turned the knife to dust and added it.

Then he ran, well jumped, aided by magic, out of the runes and to the doorway, just as the runes flared with black fire and the floor turned to ash. The marble was gone, replaced by solid black ash and runes of black fire. The basilisk skeleton trembled above Rahkesh's head. The floor hardened again to solid black.

Then the screaming began, high pitched shrieks, then full out scream as the horcrux was forcibly evicted. Rahkesh felt blood running down his face from his scar, but paid it no mind. Slowly bits of magic and silver sparks were flying out of the cup. Then massive black tendrils, transparent and sickly looking, drifted out, caressing the floor, seeking a new host. But there was none suitable, and now death power to get it into one anyway. The cup glowed grey, and exploded, bits and pieces flying into the air.

Winds began, spinning so fast the runes were ripped off the floor and dragged inwards, into the cup, drawing the fragments of soul and cup with it. A tornado formed in the center of the chamber, Rahkesh closed his eyes against the blats of magic, then began gasping in the vacuum created as the soul was dragged out into death, and dissipated into nothing…along with all the air in the room.

It was cold, so cold, Rahkesh could see his breath. He gasped in great lungfuls of nothing and choked and coughed, his lungs burning. Shutting his mouth he forced himself to calm against the raging torrent of magic drawing him in. He wasn't going to die with this, he was alive. Rahkesh loosed the thunderbird, letting its defiance draw his magic inwards and keep him alive, despite the lack of air, and cloak him in an impenetrable blanket of life.

The vortex was stopping, slowing, the tornado collapsed, bits of magic flashed about as they settled. The runes were gone, burned off the floor. And Rahkesh was shaking and dripping blood, onto his cloak and not the floor fortunately. The thunderbird settled back into his mind. Rahkesh rose and tottered to the door. He stumbled out and collapsed to the bench, summoning enough strength to close it. Then he began gasping, feeling returned to his numb limbs and his eyesight slowly cleared. He was live, and the horcrux was dead.

The door opened and Namach swooped in, Rahkesh flinched and cringed back from the dark magic around the vampire, still ultra-sensitized form his meditation work. Namach reeled in his magic, becoming so null Rahkesh would have mistaken him for muggle. Namach cleaned out the room, of whatever magic remained, and settled the remnant magic of the basilisk. By the time he'd returned Rahkesh was sitting upright, slowly checking all his magic to see if he'd lost anything to the vortex that had tried to suck him dry.

"Still human?" Namach chuckled.

"Yeah. Sorry." Rahkesh grinned back, had he failed to manage to keep enough of himself the only option would have been to turn into a vampire, or die. Which was why he'd been a bit surprised when Namach hadn't insisted on another vampire being present, apparently he was either very confident of Rahkesh's abilities, or didn't mind having an apprentice. Since Rahkesh doubted Namach would have let him die.

Sygra appeared beside him and wrapped herself around his shoulder, hissing reassuringly. Rahkesh felt his familiar call up her own magics and cloak him in them.

_We did want to try healing each other with our connection._ She pointed out. And when are you going to stop doing stupid stuff like that?

_When Voldemort's gone, I'm almost done. _

_Can I PLEASE kill this Voldemort chap? No one harms my human and he's just asking for it._

_No, but would you like some of his minions?_

_How many?_

_As many as you can get, next time we have the chance._ Sygra eyed him critically for a moment.

_Fine. You get him I get his minions. As many as I want. _

_Deal_. Rahkesh chuckled. Oh were the death eaters in for it. Sygra in full wyvern form with all fo her venoms, and those jaws and spiked tail. Plus being a basilisk she was impervius to most curses. He'd have to get pictures.

"Did you get ripped up any by that?" The ancient vampire asked, professional curiosity in whatever connection with death Rahkesh may have formed.

"Only a little. No more than I did by the Amadan's curse. I suppose it'll help with necromancy stuff?"

"Yes it will. Most necromancy student deaths happen while trying to develop such a connection. You're already way ahead. Actually many a necromancer would give an arm to have your kind of connection with death. Three different sources now, you starting a collection?"

"Not intentionally." Rahkesh muttered. He hurt all over, as if he'd been under the cruciatus curse. His lungs burned, his head ached and his hearing seemed to be half of what it normally was. He could hardly control his limbs he was shaking so hard. His gust ached and his heart beat was stuttering painfully. "I really don't feel well. Why do I feel like I'm going to collapse from losing so little?"

"Because so little was lost. Your soul is very strong Rahkesh. It's dragging back whatever you lost, from beyond death. Regrouping the bits that started to dissipate and mixing it back in with your living magic to give it life again. You'll be recovered in a few hours, but a sudden injection of death can have an awful temporary effect. Had you been touching the cup it would have latched onto the hand that was touching it, killing the magic and slowly eating away your life and soul in an unbreakable attachment with the draining magic."

"That explains a lot." Rahkesh sighed, knowing now what had happened to Dumbledore. He'd been touching the ring when he destroyed it, maybe accidentally – if it had flung itself about like the cup and Nagini did. His hand had been caught and the magic had started killing him. He would have died…even if Snape hadn't killed him. Rahkesh realized in a flash of clarity. Now what did that mean? Had Snape and the headmaster seen it as an opportunity? Or had it allowed Snape to do what he did without feeling any guilt? Because he'd reason the headmaster would die anyway? He would have to think about that. It sounded like Snape's messed up reasoning.

"A very interesting display." Ferraidar commented as Rahkesh walked out of the entry hall, Namach following. Moody looked him over like he thought Rahkesh might collapse. Rahkesh shook his head. Not happening in front of the elves.

"Get him home and make sure he rests." Namach told Moody, if he'd had the energy Rahkesh would have complained and glared, he could take care of himself. At the moment he didn't care, but if anyone tried to tuck him in they'd get cursed.

"Come back over the weekend, we'll be around a bit and I'd like to see what that thunderbird can do." Ferraidar said, Ryavar gave him a nasty smirk.

"Yes, and the human, since I hear he's quite handy in a fight." Rahkesh glared briefly at Namach, who shook his head.

"Not me that said something, probably Marluck - I'm not giving these beasts an excuse to go after my students. Pointy-eared parasites think the world is their's to beat up however they like." Rahkesh chuckled as all three elves turned on the vampire with insults. Namach wasn't serious, and the elves knew it, this group got along far too well to be enemies, or even just allies. As the two mortals walked away Rahkesh's hearing finally returned and he caught the friendly tone of the banter. Very weird.

"How dare you! Vampires are _predators_ not parasites!" Namach barked, to anyone who didn't know him he would have sounded enraged, but there was no angry magic tearing about.

"Oh don't get your fangs crossed Tristan, you're the embodiment of parasite." Ferraidar coolly retorted as the two retreating mortals turned the corner and started down the stairs.

"That's not what you were saying last night." Namach grouched softly, almost too softly to hear.

Beside him Moody tripped over his walking stick as he tried to hold back a laugh. Rahkesh waited until they were outside before he started laughing. That explained a lot. The oldest vampire alive and an immortal elf with a death dragon in his soul…that made an odd sort of sense.

-

-

Well that's several major questions of the story answered. I'm trying to wrap up the remaining mysteries before launching into the next major stage. When you leave things dangling for too long people forget them right? But if there are no mysteries or questions then why keep reading. So that's Saul's purpose fulfilled. Yes I wrote him in near the beginning for only this reason, it was an idea I had as soon as I started thinking about bloodmagic before starting ASCaL. And Sygra's identity revealed, some of you guessed that one already, I did give a few clues.

Since someone asked in a review – yes I made up all the bloodmagic, feather magic, stone magic, string magic, soul magic, necromancy, etc. I have a bit of an overactive imagination. And we haven't even gotten started on bloodmetal, soul magic, and the various branches of necromancy yet. Or life magic, but there won't be much of that.

Anyone remember who the Chachapoyaro are? Yes? Good. I had those chapters back in the past for a reaosn relevant to the present, you'll be finding out soon. And Draco WILL get killed or sorted out next chapter. Plus Silas animagus. I was going to put it in here but that seemed like a good place to take a break.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

"So Rahkesh, classes?" Silas asked, folding his own list into an envelope.

"Marluck's extreme martial arts class…which I think Professor Ahmad co-teaches, intro to mind magic, second level healing class, and of course the double advanced bloodmagic/intro to necromancy." Rahkesh said, handing his list over. If they were all in one place they might as well just send it in together. Like everything else sending in their course lists was a challenge – the special paper couldn't be written on until twenty-four hours before it was due, and they had to get it to the school without animal help. He and the Ateres cousins were using a charm set with a thread magic attachment. If it worked just right their papers should land exactly in the cneter of the headmistress's desk – Daray had gotten a chip from the wood when he'd been discussing his demon form with the headmistress and his grandmother. "Who's teaching that last? Namach, Xanthius, or Vaeryes?"

"Namach I think. With help from Xanthius since it's a double class. It will be nice to get away from Vaeryes won't it?" Daray said.

"Yes! Does he get along with anybody?"

"No." Silas said, "Daray?"

"Same classes actually. Though I have this feeling a lot of it will wind up being on my own. No one knows how I'll react to necromancy." Daray said, deliberately leaving out why – Draco was sitting nearby and he didn't know about Daray's demon form. "You?"

"Second level healing, intro to mind magic, extreme martial arts, potions, and that class they call Disguise and Deception, but which is actually the intro espionage class coupled with lessons for beginner con-artists." Silas said and they all chuckled. Altering yourself physically in seconds, in crowds, without anyone noticing, so you could elude trackers, was a useful skill. So was manipulating large crowds, merely by being present in certain types of clothing. Students who were going into various businesses or government positions also took it – the class partially focused on how to act and appear in ways that allowed you some control over another person's perceptions and mind. A subtle sort of mind/emotional-control based upon appearance, gestures, voice, and body language. Rahkesh would have liked to take it himself, but the mixed bloodmagic and necromancy class was already a double class that took up twice as much time as an ordinary class.

"Uh oh, anyone have a friend who sends letters by albino eagles?" Daray asked, looking out the window.

"No." Rahkesh said.

"Probably not good news then. Oh it must be from Akren, there're three of them." Daray said, opening the window wandlessly for the big birds to soar through. They each dropped a letter, circled the room once, and left. Rahkesh picked up the one that had landed neatly on his knee, his name facing up at him, in the correct direction to read. Very well trained birds then.

"Isn't there a recent graduate who specializes in training magical birds?" Silas asked, not expecting an answer as they each opened their letter.

_Rahkesh, _

_Last night a vigilante group in London attacked a property belonging to the last remaining London werewolf pack. Three werewolves were taken captive including one Relora Greywind, Akren alumnus graduated 1952. The werewolves were turned over the newly created Department for the Disposal of Dark Magical Beings._

_As you are aware there is a standing agreement between every governmental organization in the world and the Akren Alumni Association that all criminal cases dealing with alumni be processed by the AAA under our laws. This has not happened. Not only was the alumnus in question taken into custody by a vigilante group not legally a part of the government but the British Ministry of Magic has not contacted us regarding turning over the werewolf to the AAA. _

_At a secret meeting yesterday afternoon the Wizengamot declared the agreement with the AAA null, accused Akren of sheltering "Dark Beings", and stated that any alumni found anywhere in the Isles will be immediately arrested. This includes mortal humans, on charges of "consorting with illegal dark creatures." All other agreements with the nations currently members of the Dark Magical Being Eradication Union have also been removed, the list is as follows:_

_United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea._

_The AAA is calling all alumni and all current students to a mandatory conference in the second conference hall of Mt. Cerberus, Akren Range. This evening at 8. We will discuss these developments and what an appropriate response would be. _

_If you cannot physically attend we have three mind magic sorcerers standing by, at your request your consciousness can be brought to the conference hall. As this is a mandatory meeting your presence is required in some form or other. _

_Sincerely,_

_Marvin Gale_

_AAA director_

Rahkesh sighed and rubbed at his temples. His head still throbbed from the bloodmagic ritual he had just completed. He had hoped he would have recovered enough from destroying the horcurx to safely do the ritual, but apparently he should have waited another day. And now this. Had everyone gone insane? Attacking and abducting an Akren alumnus?

And since when were there organized vigilante groups roaming around snatching people? He hadn't been into Diagon Alley in long enough that he might have missed them. But he was still amazed the Ministry was permitting their existence.

"Damn, there go our plans for the evening." Daray groaned. "I was looking forward to sampling some London…cuisine."

Rahkesh blinked over at the vampire, and rolled his eyes. They'd met Sierra and another of the Ateres, Jamis, in Berlin a few days ago. The Ateres had combined the potions they'd brewed, with the aid of some of the objects stolen from the Department of Mysteries, with the blood of a few carefully selected mortals. Daray had been drinking only magical blood for almost two weeks, from the same person – Draco. This had altered his blood chemistry to what the potion needed it to be to work, that and he'd carefully controlled what Draco ate so that the blood he got was just right. The mortals selected had all been muggles and Daray had replaced most of his blood volume with the muggle potion enhanced blood. It had worked, temporarily, and he'd been edgy all day, ready to get back to his usual habits. He'd visited a few places with Rahkesh and Silas, but hadn't been able to actually feed off anyone yet. Draco, upon finding out that he was actually allowed to eat normally again, had been relieved, and was now actively avoiding Daray much more than he had been. Now that Daray wasn't using Draco for his blood so much he might be interested in using the human for other things.

"Yes, I was looking forward to one more night out before returning to Akren." Rahkesh said, penning off a quick letter.

"With that pretty little quarter veela what's-her-name." Daray chuckled.

"Her name is Keesha." Rahkesh growled, Daray had been teasing him relentlessly about Keesha. Not only was the Ministry managing to start a war they were also messing directly with his life. He'd been looking forward to another night with Keesha before returning to Akren.

"Wait, wait, backup, Rahkesh is willingly sleeping with a magical creature?" Silas asked. "Has the moon turned blue? Hell frozen over?"

"Oh stop that." Rahkesh grouched, "I have no problem with magical creatures, Keesha is a lot of fun. It's just anyone from Akren. And vampires."

"I'm just drowning in the discrimination there." Silas snickered. "Everyone but us?"

"_Goblins_ would be better. They don't drink your blood and try to force you to change species."

"It's for your own good." Daray replied cheerfully, "and we don't all do that."

"No, but you do always drink your partners blood."

"Not always." Silas said, "just most of the time."

"Okay. I wouldn't mind a vampire, if I removed their fangs first." Rahkesh finally decided. Both vampires flinched. "I don't suppose either of you knows anything about what actions the AAA might take?" A change of topic before they somehow started a fight sounded good.

"Who is the current Minister of Magic here?" Daray asked, putting his own letter on the table, Draco cautiously looked over from his place on the floor beside the table, to read. His eyes going very wide as he glanced up at both of them.

"Gary Baines, he's the third in two years. The other two were assassinated. This place is going to hell in a hand basket." Rahkesh muttered. Ever since Rufus had been taken out. Of course he wasn't actually dead, but no one needed to know that. He was still comatose and effectively dead to the world. His two successors hadn't lasted long enough for anyone to bother learning their names. This one was some radical anti-magical creature activist, and one-time assistant to Dolores Umbridge, though that had been ten years previous he certainly shared her ideas.

"And I don't suppose killing him would get anyone better. No one's offering a contract on him, not much point. I think the tactic now is to let him lead them into a ruin." Daray said. "And just what are you looking at?" He snapped at Draco, who quickly jerked back from examining the letter. Rahkesh and Silas traded looks; both privately hoping Draco would go and curse Daray. "Didn't Mariah teach you anything?" Daray muttered. "If a slave needs to know something he's told it." Draco blinked down at the floor; he had his wand in one hand, and had been practicing curses and other spells all day with Silas. Mariah hadn't set any limits of his magic, but he'd been allowed near a wand since his capture. Human or not a possibly mentally unstable slave with a wand could be a problem. Mariah might have wanted him to come around and turn into an apprentice of sorts, but she wasn't going to let him use magic anywhere near her beloved research projects until she was sure of him.

Rahkesh looked over his letter again, then at the clock, they had four hours and the big albino harpy eagle that had brought the letter had also brought a portkey – if the Akren alumni were already outlawed then why should they care about shattering the anti-portkey wards?

He might have time to go see the Weasely's, if he hurried. He had to know if Ron had been part of the group mentioned in the letter. Rahkesh winced when he imagined how that conversation would go. Ron and he were already on opposite sides, but he had held out some hope of avoiding directly fighting his former friend. Summoning a piece of parchment and pen Rahkesh tried a different route and wrote a quick note to Ginny. He had been in contact with her and the twins for several months. Mostly exchanging word on Ron's increasing anti-magical creature activities and more and more radical stance against anything labeled "dark". The last he had heard Ron was a member of a large group calling themselves the "Saviors of Humanity", who had been in favor of the new Department for the Disposal of Dark Magical Beings. They had also campaigned to get the newest Minister elected after he had promised to sign into law harsher and harsher punishments for using dark magic or being seen with a magical being, such as a werewolf or fae, or even veela. Interestingly house elves were perfectly fine. Currently there was a list of some fifty spells that were considered so dark as to carry the death penalty, and that included anyone found using necromancy or soul magic.

_Ginny, _

_I just received word that last night a vigilante group attacked the last remaining werewolf pack in London. In your last letter you mentioned Ron's friends were becoming more militant and starting their own investigations against people who they thought were using dark magics or knew magical beings personally. You mentioned they were also going after neutral people in the belief that "if you're not for us you must be the enemy". Was Ron's group part of this attack? _

_If so tell get yourself and your siblings and parents out of there as fast as possible. One of those attacked was an Akren alumnus. The Alumni have called a meeting and are planning retaliation. It won't be pretty and it certainly won't be legal. The Spanish Werewolf Packs Union will also be sending in agents to dispose of everyone remotely connected to this group. If you get out now they'll let you go. _

_I know your parents don't want to abandon Ron, neither do I. I have already tried to get some friends who are members of the Spanish Werewolf Packs Union to pass a movement granting leniency to the younger members of these vigilante groups. It was unsuccessful. The Alumni Association would kill me for trying; the Ministry has outlawed all Akren alumni as supporters of dark magic and evil creatures. _

_There is a combined force of various magical beings preparing to attack all of the nations who are trying to exterminate magical beings. It won't be long now until they attack. They'll be starting with these vigilante groups. If Ron was involved then get out of Europe before Sunday night. I know it's short notice but the response will be as quick as it can be, it may even happen on Sunday. _

_The Salem Academies (both of them) are holding a summer sessions for students fleeing this war. If you can get your family to the American Flying Carpet Service they'll give them information on where to go. There are several groups ready to help anyone fleeing Europe, they'll take you in. _

_I'll try to stop by after dinner tonight if possible. If you haven't left by noon and Ron is home then close the shades on all your room windows. At this point I doubt there's anything I can say to him that will make a difference. If he isn't home then leave them open. _

Rahkesh didn't sign the letter, which was his way of letting Ginny know it was actually him, the second was that the parchment was always washed in a potion beforehand that turned it green when Ginny or either of the twins held it. Rahkesh had used a bloodmagic potion with their blood for this, to keep Ron from knowing they were writing to him.

"They'll be discussing the demons at this meeting as well." Daray said, sending off a reply from all three of them. "Akren does have a policy for dealing with demon invasions, professor Xanthius insisted on building one. We're not supposed to learn about until our final year, so Sierra wouldn't tell me what it was, just that it existed."

"How has that investigation gone?" Rahkesh asked, while he'd been destroying a horcrux the Ateres family had been hired to trace the demons back to their origin.

"Uncle Kalik has built a system to read disturbances in the flows of magic in the area. They're using a deathmagic scanner to trace them." Daray said. "Surprising, isn't it? That this Voldemort fellow hasn't claimed them? We've detected evidence of a portal but it's too old to trace the exact location."

"They're his." Draco said suddenly from the floor.

"What?" Silas asked.

"They're his. The demons are his." Draco replied.

"How would you know?' Rahkesh asked.

"Before…before Mariah caught me, I was a death eater." Draco said slowly, "when I failed at…at a mission…he locked me in the dungeons. There was a huge cavern down there. We passed it every time I was brought out. I saw this big gold…pool in there. With demons carved on the sides."

"Does Mariah know you worked for Voldemort?" Silas asked.

"Yes. He was going to kill me, she saved me." Draco said, bitterly. Yes Mariah had saved him, she'd also made him her slave and had been drinking his blood ever since.

"You ought to be more grateful." Daray snapped at Draco, who flinched, a seemed to curl in on himself.

"Oh enough Daray. He'll be back with Mariah tomorrow and you won't have to see him again." Rahkesh grouched.

"Depend on if she accepts Farov's offer." Daray said cheerfully. "Farov keeps many slaves on hand for his guests."

"You're an eighteen year old vampire. Grandson of Cyala Ateres or not unless you're carrying a message from her Farov wouldn't give you the time of day, except maybe to bite you." Rahkesh pointed out. No matter how successful Daray was proving himself to be, or what family he came from, he was still a very young vampire. And regardless of what Cyala thought in another's territory it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that one of the younger Ateres would wind up being snacked on or killed. Which was why Cyala kept them close when they were young and always knew the exact locations of every family member under five hundred. Farov was unlikely to risk Cyala's wrath, if only because he'd been working closely with her half-sister for the past few years and therefore probably didn't have any secrets the Ateres didn't know about. But Lord Hadrian wouldn't have anything to be concerned about if he decided that Daray looked tasty.

"All right, very true. But Farov does provide the entertainment for most meetings at Lord Hadrian's manor. Since London has somehow managed to become such a vital spot right now we'll be meeting there a lot for the next few years. I'm sure even if Mariah does sell him we'll be seeing him again, probably on stage." Daray smirked, Draco had gone even paler than usual.

"And here I thought live sex acts as a spectator sport went out of style a few thousand years ago. You vampires always manage to be the stone-age throwbacks of the world." Rahkesh retorted, Moody had explained to him, in nauseating detail, everything vampires deemed "entertainment". Rahkesh was never, ever, going to one of their parties. "And if it was a big gathering, and after the meetings were over there was some sort of party, aren't young vampires just as likely to get passed around as the actual sex slaves?"

That shut Daray up fast enough. Draco was trying not to laugh – he might wind up mauled if he did, sitting as he was by Daray's knee. Silas didn't bother hiding his mirth. Silas had a way out of such situations. His and Nuri's hypnotic and telepathic abilities were combining at the moment, and the process would take several years to finish. Too much uncontrolled telepathy, or being fed on excessively, would cause a negative reaction by draining whoever happened to be nearest. All forms of sex magic were entirely out of the question and the crushing subconscious power exerted by the more powerful vampires could cause his mind to temporarily move into Nuri's body, trapping them both in the panther, and possibly damaging Silas bloodmagic. While he certainly wasn't safe at Akren, at a large gathering he would be because of the sheer number of powerful vampires around. One on one, Silas, being rather good looking, wouldn't have chance, but with many powerful vampires around there was a serious risk of telepathic overexertion. Nobody wanted to permanently damage Cyala Ateres youngest grandson, who, by the way, showing signs of some very dangerous hypnotic abilities.

XX

"Harry!" Ginny called, running forward and hugging him. Rahkesh, in his Harry Potter disguise, tried not to wince away. Close contact was dangerous…he had started thinking like a true Akren-trained paranoid Rahkesh admitted to himself. Just because at school someone might knife him didn't mean everyone would. And Ginny didn't know how to broadcast non-hostile intentions like Akren students always did. Even in the halls if you weren't going after anyone you let everyone know you weren't, and if you weren't sure if fighting would be necessary then you didn't do anything. Lying and giving off a "safe" (however safe Akren ever got) aura and then putting a poisoned knife in someone would get you attacked by the rest of the school. In a school full of paranoid killers such rules were necessary. Though they were unofficial.

"Evening Ginny, I'm sorry I don't have long." Rahkesh said, spotting both Fred and George he started to worry. "Didn't the twins move already?"

"Yes, to Australia actually. And Bill and Charlie are long gone. They're back right now for a visit."

"A visit."

"Ron…he isn't living at home anyone Harry. He's living in some group house with some…friends." Ginny said softly, very disapprovingly. "A purist Light Magic supremacist group." She finally admitted.

"Your parents?"

"Well, they're all for light magic, you know that. But even they know that the Cruciatus Curse magic was originally designed for healing. The healers aren't allowed to use it anymore for that. Most of the neutral or undecided don't agree with that. It's used for treating psychic shock you know."

"It is?" Rahkesh said, surprised. He'd known it had been designed to be used, in exact dosages, for healing. Psychic shock was a lethal condition resulting from over-use of accidental magic in children who's magical channels hadn't finished forming. It killed some dozen children in Britain every year. The cruciatus curse was the only cure, in a very precise dose. So a dozen or so children had died that year as a result of too much "light only" legislation. That wouldn't go over well.

"The healers weren't allowed to do a thing, this year was bad, sixteen children Harry. All of them could have lived but it would have meant Azkaban for the healers. The Ministry is being driven by groups like Ron's and they won't let anyone do anything "dark" even for a good cause." Ginny said, leading him into the house. Rahkesh opened his mind and reached out; if Ron showed up he was leaving.

No Ron, but Molly came and hugged him, and the twins were waiting with Arthur on the couch. Boxes, bulging, were stacked to the ceiling. Magic flared around shrunken containers. It seemed that the Weasely's were finally leaving.

"Where are you going?" Rahkesh asked, once Molly let him breathe.

"America, for the moment. Molly's got some old friends from school in New York." Arthur said. Rahkesh nodded, that would be good, Molly would need help adjusting to Ron's absence. Arthur, it seemed, had already decided and left his youngest son behind.

"Luna and I will be going to school together. I think after I graduate I'll come back and help Hermione." Ginny said.

"You will not be coming back to this awful place!" Molly snapped. Ginny rolled her eyes at Harry and nodded obediently. That fight wasn't over, but apparently her mother was upset enough that it could wait.

"I'll have to find the time to go see Hermione soon." Rahkesh said, thinking how unlikely that was.

"She's got Padma, Parvati, Dean, and Terry Boot working with her. Te Hogwarts staff have been helping them find muggleborns and get them out of the country, along with anyone else they can find. Mostly they're just working with muggleborn witches and wizards. They've modified the Hogwarts Quill to find children as young as four, so they can talk to the families and get them to move abroad as soon as possible. They've got a few others too, people have been volunteering to help or making anonymous donations to hire help. And there's an official organization in Spain, I think Hermione and the others will be hired by them soon, and Hermione's working with someone from the Spanish Ministry to find a way to have double citizenships, so if things get really awful here they'll be harder to arrest and can get out." Ginny explained quickly. Rahkesh already knew about the contacts in the Spanish Ministry, Remus was in the loop, but he hadn't heard about the modified magics on the quill in Hogwarts that recorded magical children's names. Probably Hermione's doing.

"Tea Harry dear?" Molly asked, moving away towards the kitchen.

"Certainly." Rahkesh said, if only to give her something to do for the moment. "There's a mandatory meeting of all students in an hour so I don't have long, and I don't know when I'll get enough time to visit again. Though with you in America it will be easier." He set his cup down, it was too hot, though Molly was clutching hers almost enough to break it.

"Ginny said that in your letter something had happened?" Arthur asked.

"Yes. Last night a vigilante group attacked the last werewolf pack in London. Three werewolves were taken captive, one of them as an alumnus of the school I'm training at." Rahkesh explained slowly.

"Oh dear." Arthur muttered, "and then they ended the agreements."

Rahkesh carefully raised one eyebrow…so Arthur knew where he was going to school. Interesting.

"I guessed when it came up for the vote. I was in the observers area." Arthur said slowly.

"Very well. The meeting tonight is to discuss retaliation. That's why I sent you that letter as soon as I could. Whatever happens it's going to be nasty. We're talking about an army of very dangerous people, who are all now focused on Britain. You'll be fine in America, you're on the vampire's list of people not to kill, if they can help it. Once you're out of the country you'll be safe. I'm more worried about Ron."

"So are we," Arthur said slowly, "so are we."

"Where is he?"

"We don't know. He won't tell us. Says we're dark sympathizers. Because he caught me writing a letter to Remus at Christmas." Arthur sighed. Rahkesh winced, he had hoped Ron's new friends hadn't been able to turn him against Remus. But he was sure they were very persuasive and very convincing. The people running these groups would have to be smart. With plenty of ready observations and explanations to back up their ideas.

"It's a very radical group, he was in a more moderate one, but they weren't "doing enough to stop the evil beasts from taking over"" Ginny said.

"Is he able to have a rational discussion about dark magic, or does he just fly off shouting and raging?" Rahkesh asked.

"The latter." Fred muttered.

"Threw a fit when we tried to discuss its potential healing merits." George agreed.

"That was when he left home." Fred explained.

"Could stand the idea of us even thinking of possibilities. It's all bad, no exceptions, he won't listen to any evidence the contrary." George said slowly.

"Talk about denial." They both finished. Rahkesh smiled, some things never changed.

"Well I don't think he'd be willing to listen to me either. He's already convinced the vampires have under some sort of spell. I think the best we can hope for is that when the killing starts he'll get scared enough to run, away." Rahkesh said.

"He is a coward." Ginny agreed. Molly went white and looked grim, but said nothing in Ron's defense.

"We're leaving in two hours, we'll be in New York tomorrow. Will you let us know what's decided?"

"Yes, but I think you'll find out in the papers first." Rahkesh agreed.

XXX

"There's large, immense, and then there's _that._" Daray said, nodding ahead over the heads of Hell's Steeds they were riding towards Mt. Cerberus.

Several miles past the Akren cutoff on the trail that led up through the higher peaks of the Akren range stood Mt. Cerberus. The trail was wide enough for three of the flaming horses to walk side by side, but on the left it dropped off an abrupt two thousand feet. On the right rose a craggy ridge, the top of which was a thousand feet above them and still carried a thin layer of ice.

Ahead the ridge dropped and the trail and ridge-top merged into a broad path with steep sides that sloped away. About a mile ahead the trail ran directly through Mt. Cerberus in a tunnel big enough for a large elephant to go through, straight through the mountain. Where it met the mountain the trail disappeared into darkness, between the front paws of an enormous three headed dog.

The dog, wolfish in appearance, took up the entire side of the mountain. The peak, some six thousand feet above, was the tip of the higher ear on the middle head. The dogs paws, bigger than their horses, were placed on either side of two immense black doors.

"The carving is exquisite." Rahkesh said, he rather liked it, though he'd never seen anything so enormous. You could fit several aircraft carriers inside the carving and still have room left over. The right head lunged out at them, growling down over the trail, the left looked away into the distance. The center head stared straight at them, teeth showing just a little. Just behind the shoulders the carving met the mountain, and here flame-like carvings swirled around the mountain sides. Every hair was carved out, and with a layer of snow and ice glittering on the heads and torsos, with the lower paws gray rock the huge carvings looked like they could come alive. "If you stand on that little space directly between the eyes of the left head and face the same way it is you've got a clear line of view to Mt. Simurg." Mt. Simurg was a four-sided slightly pyramid –like mountain and the nesting site of the five breeding pairs of Simurgs in the Akren area. Since there were only a dozen breeding pairs worldwide this did make it rather important.

"Aren't the original Simurg's living there?" Silas asked.

"Yeah, Namach created the species back when he was a young vampire." Daray replied, "he made eight of them, the surviving two are living there."

"Oh, look at that!" Ally said sharply, pointing west. She had a set of ominoculars out, and the others picked up their own. There was a herd of pegasi coming down, big black and white winged horses with silver tack. Rahkesh counted thirty as the herd came in to land on the large platform above the right head's shoulder. It was too high above to see what was happening, but there were two holding areas for animals. One for flying creatures on the upper level and one for those that walked. There also supposedly a long-unused area for those who could teleport through water lower down in the mountain, along with a flame-room for fire-teleportation.

"They're opening up the flame room for the first time in eight hundred years." Daray said, "the Ateres who are Akren graduates are teleporting through fire in their Dark Angel form."

"Bet that caused a stir." Silas chuckled, "first grandmother keeps them hidden for so many centuries then they're flying everywhere suddenly."

"Several of the City Masters are fairly recent, they hadn't seen us before. I think she lost track of how long it had been, and thought showing off a little wouldn't hurt." Daray said. "There's a team of Nightmares."

Behind them came beautiful six black and silver carriages, pulled by big black horses wreathed in black flames, as they passed their coats shimmered and ghostly images flashed across them, briefly reflecting the nightmares of everyone who looked at them. Too fast to see and covered over in darkness, but present enough. If they stood still and you looked at them you could actually see your worse dreams playing out in detail, but each person only saw their own. Their hooves made no sound but left shimming black indents in the rock and slowly healed. Those would also show your worst dreams if you glanced into them, and those you could get stuck in. If you breathed the air to close to the horses you're mind got sucked into their magic, and your nightmares, hence their name. They were an all-female species, produced by black unicorn/Sleipnir hybrids that were attacked by Dementors at birth and transformed into Nightmares. Though that might sound cruel it was actually the only way a black unicorn/Sleipnir hybrid could survive. They all died unless they were attacked by Dementors, and the males all died anyway.

"Nice, grandmother has an albino team hidden away somewhere." Silas said, admiring the trailing waves of darkness that followed them, blurring their forms.

"Whenever magical people gather, they have to show off." Ally chuckled, "and, naturally being the best in the world the Akren graduates have to show off the most."

"Is your brother doing anything?" Rahkesh asked.

"He's on the AAA board of directors, he's already here." Ally said. "Newest one so he doesn't have much influence."

The big black doors, covered in trailing black vines that glinted gold, living vines infused with enchanted gold fibers, opened for them silently.

Inside an actual Cerberus was sitting in a large alcove to the left. He was larger than Fluffy, and more wolfish. Silver and gray patterning like a wolf ran down its back with a whitish belly, and pale green eyes. The right head was missing its left eye and the middle head had claw marks down its throat. When it opened its mouth the left fang was made of silver. Rahkesh immediately grinned, taking a guess as to the canine's identity.

"Evening Marluck." Rahkesh said, dismounting and sending the flaming horse off to the right, the stables was over there, the animal would wait until he needed to leave. Another big wolfish Cerberus came out from a passageway that led off behind the alcove. This one was much darker, almost black. "And the other Marluck," Rahkesh added. The husband and wife team growled playfully at him.

"Anyone died yet?" Ally asked curiously. A brief flash of telepathy from Steve Marluck told them that there was a no fighting in the conference room rule…being enforced by Professor Strawlime. Anyone who started a fight got to test out a few of the mad potion's master's latest recipes.

"Huh, no _there's _an incentive to behave." Silas chuckled. The group made their way past the two Cerberus and down a broad hallway with a high domed ceiling covered in tiny jewels that sparkled in the light from the torches. The torches were solid gold in the shape of horns and were hung with strings of hollowed pearls; a White-fairy Butterfly cocoon inside each gave off a bright white light. Black vines were growing, in absence of all natural sunlight light, against the walls. These were Guardian Vines, a magical plant that set itself to guarding the lairs of Cerberus's, in exchange for the canine's magic, which allowed the vines to transform are and rock molecules into what they needed to survive. In return for the magic the vines shot acidic neurotoxins onto invaders, strangled them with their loops, or ripped them apart with their billions of serrated thorns. They were immune to flame spells or freeze and could bounce back most cutting or blasting spells, with an uncanny accuracy. This was a special breed that could draw on the magic of any creature, and Rahkesh could feel a light tingling across his skin as the vines "sipped" a little from his magic.

The hall itself was the second set of doors, huge black iron constructs that slid back into he walls, rather than opening in or out. Inside was a raised platform surrounded by rows and rows of circular bleachers leading up many levels.

"Seats thousands," Rianae said, appearing beside them. "Good thing you got here early."

"This is a diplomatic issue, you and your mother arrived early?" Rahkesh guessed.

"Yeah, I've been hanging around trying not to get cursed for a few hours." The pretty female vampire replied, "you wouldn't believe the hubbub, a couple of assassins arrived a few hours ago, apparently they were on assignments to kill each other. You should have seen the fight, until Strawlime arrived with some new thing that will supposedly increase memory capacity and recall speed. Strangely enough they all shut up and sat down then."

"There's always a chance it would work." Daray said. "Strawlime did invent the only known potion cures for advanced rabies, ebola, magic-induced brain hemorrhages, birth-deafness, appendicitis, birth-marks, and magical malaria. And that's just some of his medical successes."

"Hmm, and killed several thousand people while testing those potions." Rahkesh said, "did you hear about what happened to the people he tested his original batch of magical malaria cure on? They _vaporized_ VERY slowly. It took one of them six weeks to die; his feet started going first, then his eyes and fingers. Atom by atom he was vaporized. Yes Strawlime is a genius, no one will argue otherwise, but taking anything of his that is at all experimental is not helpful is you actually have painless long-term survival plans."

"It still might work, those assassins could have wound up with the first permanently magical enhanced memories in the world."

"Yeah, or melt their brains out through their ears." Ally said. "I'll see you all later, Monday actually, I should go sit with my family." Her brother, who looked like he could be her twin, was waving over the crowd from the sixth row. Next to him were four others of a similar appearance.

Rahkesh looked around and caught sight of Moody, talking to the headmistress. Moody's eye was twitching everywhere, too many people. Though the whole area behind the stands was open so there were plenty of exits. The headmistress, naturally, didn't look at all phased by the crowds and high tension. Silas and Daray left to find the rest of their family – a flock of dark angels in the second row, and Rahkesh made his way through the crowds to Moody. Being very careful not to bump into anyone too much, fighting might not be allowed inside but he didn't fancy getting attacked over anything the minute he left.

"This meeting is for alumni only right?" Rahkesh asked upon reaching the headmistress, he got a nod in return. "I was here yesterday, there were two elves visiting Namach, can they get past the wards?"

"They could, but they won't. I don't particularly trust them so I sent Xanthius home and told Namach to do something about the other two or I'd close off the valley from them. I can do that, and while they could fight it the magics here are…intense. Every graduating class is required to add another dimension to the wards. So Xanthius is home in the elven realm, with that delusional psychopath Ryavar. And the other…Namach is keeping him occupied." Nvara replied, getting an amused snort from Moody.

"I bet he is."

"As long as the elf is unconscious during the meeting I don't care how he got that way." Nvara said with a knife-like smirk, before excusing herself to go find the AAA director.

"Regulus find anything?" Rahkesh asked as he picked out a set of seats behind the Ateres and began moving over there.

"No. Nagini, the ring, the cup, the diary, just the locket, you, and Voldemort himself to go." Moody said with a sigh. Limping over to a seat he settled down. "I'm too old for this."

"You and Remus spent five hours in practice duels yesterday." Rahkesh pointed out. "And he's got that nice werewolf healing and stamina thing."

The hall filled quickly. Akren enrolled perhaps thirty new students per year, somewhere close to a third didn't live to graduate and of those that did many more died soon after, especially among the vampires. However those that lived tended to live a long time. Apart from having access to a network of most of the world's best healers via the Akren Alumni Association graduates knew how to look after themselves. Vampires were immortal and fae had very long life spans. So despite the school's size there were an awful lot of living (or undead) graduates around. The hall seated twenty-six thousand and all seats were filled, not including the space on the floor for fifty or so centaurs.

"I had no idea we had so many goblins." Rahkesh said, counting a score of them.

"They have long lives." Moody agreed, "damn tough too. Ah, our fauns have arrived, they always make an entrance." From the doorway a silver mist spread into the room, flashing with little lights and interrupted by swirling gold leaves, out of it trotted eighteen fauns. Part goat part human they took up the part of the second row that had no seats, leaving the floor to the larger centaurs.

"There are none of them at Akren right now." Rahkesh said, eyeing them curiously, he'd never seen a faun.

"Had three in my year, they have this magic of theirs that makes them unaffected by gravity, very neat trick. However, you'll never find pranksters like fauns, drove everyone insane."

"That explains a lot." Rahkesh chuckled, Moody swung his walking stick at Rahkesh's knees, Rahkesh brushed it off with a whisper of a wandless block. "Here are the animal fae."

The animal fae were fae that were actually animals and merely had a second hominid form. They took on all the natural characteristics of their species even when in hominid form. The score of cheetah fae that sauntered in, in cheetah form, quickly transformed to hominids, with pointed ears and faint colorations, delicate cheetah-like markings, on their skin. Instead of hair they had thick fur over the top of their heads and trailing down the backs of their necks. They dashed up to the tenth row faster than Rahkesh could blink and settled down. After them came a large group of lions, who settled down and growled threateningly at the okapis that followed them in. The okapis ignored them, and were soon followed by several eagles, a herd of elk and six enormous brown bears.

"So they actually eat each other right?" Rahkesh asked.

"I don't think so. They can all sense the difference between a normal animals and a fae, and they all have their own magics." Moody said, "we had two of the bears in my year. A bit scary to face that in a fist fight."

"There's a cheetah and an eagle at Akren now. I've heard we're getting a bunch of lions this year."

"Uh oh. Better stay away from the females, the males get territorial." Moody warned.

"Ten galleons says the vampires take that as a challenge."

"Do I look stupid to you? There – that's Marvin Gale, AAA director."

Rahkesh looked over to where Moody was pointing. Marvin was a tall, thin, gold eyed, gray haired werewolf. He had a thick scar through his right eyebrow that disappeared into his hair. Rahkesh felt towards with a bit of magic and sensed the aura of an alpha werewolf…but no pack affiliation. Marvin was a loner. Dressed in faded blue jeans, a gray sweater and an old tattered leather jacket he didn't appear at all unusual. Until he turned a bit and Rahkesh caught the edge of magic from the bloodmetal armbands on both arms, bloodmetal ear rings in both ears, bloodmetal infused tattoo on each lower leg, and the bloodmetal chain around his neck. His bloodmagics were not extraordinary, but the power of his bloodmetal armor was. And its extent. Infusing bloodmetal into a tattoo took considerable skill.

Bloodmetal was a substance formed from a mix of metals, gems, and the blood of its creator. It was used only as armor or in weapons. Once made it took on a life of its own and could change shape and move to intercept whatever was aimed at its creator. A necklace of it would stop a sniper bullet aimed at your head, with no bruising or real expenditure of magic. It was difficult to create and unless made correctly it destabilized and blew up instantly. The type that was used in tattoos was liquid like ink and had similar properties.

"Looks like they're finally starting." Moody observed, moving over to make room for a female figure in black robes with her hood up to hide her face. She didn't offer any greeting.

The headmistress was in the center of the small arena, arms crossed, waiting. Finally she rolled her eyes, and snapped her fingers.

BANG

The floor rocked as a wave of sound rolled up the seats, making everyone wince and shut up.

"You know, after teaching most of you, I would have expected you'd know when to sit down and shut up." Aelfly said slowly, her voice, amplified by voice magics so that to each person it sounded as though she were only a few feet away, drowned out everything else and brought a few more winces. "I'm turning this meeting over to Marvin Gale, elected head of the Akren Alumni Association." She turned and walked to a high-backed seat against the wall near the door. Marvin moved to the center, a flick of his wand lighting the threadmagic necklace wrapped around the bloodmetal one. It was a piece designed to broadcast his voice to a large crowd.

"You all received the same letter, and I thank you for gathering with so little notice. Most of us are aware of the situation in Europe, but I'll give an update anyway.

Firstly, most everyone here should be aware that the attitude towards magical creatures other than mortal humans in most of Europe has been particularly cold in recent times, and steadily getting worse. Extreme prejudice against magical beings other than themselves has been shaping amongst most magical European societies. Into this strained situation stepped a very powerful wizard, calling himself Voldemort. He has set him up as a self-proclaimed "Dark Wizard"." Here Marvin had to pause for snickers and laughs. Though there was also a great deal of disgust and shaking heads at such ignorance. There was no such thing as a dark wizard. There was just a wizard who had intentions of harming others. It always amazed Rahkesh how he'd never figured this out before leaving Hogwarts.

"We all know how the European communities tend to turn things into black and white, light or dark, good and evil. The continuous struggle between the so called light and dark makes them much more susceptible to powerful individuals taking one side or the other, as an identity, and getting extreme. With Voldemort offering an extreme of dark and evil a good portion of the populace, and government, has turned to extremist "light" ways, in order to show themselves as being "good" people. Voldemort has rallied followers whom most mortals view as dark, such as Dementors and packs of mass-murderers.

Now in the last few centuries the vampire population has been increasing worldwide. This increase has largely been amongst nonmagic or adult magic users. Very few of the creations are sanctioned by any clan or family or the Master of City in which they take place. Seeing a problem the rulers of the vampire are now stepping in to stop this, and to reduce the vampire population. Unfortunately most people who become vampires like to think of themselves as "dark", and are into illegal activities. Dark has become synonymous with illegal. And with the City Masters enforcing population control many of these newer vampires fled to Voldemort as a powerful 'dark" being who would help them. He gives them a cause to fight for and to rally around. This has only increased the mortal magic users definition of magical beings as evil and dark. The situation was not helped by the centaurs land being taken away by wealthy human supremacist mortal magic users. The centaurs protested, and were labeled "dark" as well. Over the past five years there have been fifty occurrences of veela transforming in order to fight off attacks, mostly attempted rape, by mortal magic users. By transforming to fight instead of retaining a "proper" form, they too began to get labeled as enemies. All this has finally come to a head and within the last several months magical beings like vampire, centaurs, werewolves, and fae have been outlawed in most of Europe."

There were some outraged shouts, but most everyone already knew this. Rahkesh hoped Marvin knew what he was doing. The pressure in the room seemed to increase with waves of pounding angry magic. The barely restrained fury at such stupidity was feeding off itself and building fast. Off to the side, where the City Masters had set themselves and their followers up, the lead vampires began to send out waves of telepathic signals. Mostly threat, partly calming, the angry magic subsided a little as the vampires obeyed the commands, even if they weren't from those cities, and calmed down and stopped broadcasting. Their magic and rage reduced to a low simmer. For once the rigid vampiric hierarchy was useful, the most powerful forcing the rest to not get out of control. Feeling around Rahkesh sensed a similar thing happening with the werewolves as the alphas dragged their packs back into line.

Marvin ignored his audience, who seemed likely to run off on a killing spree at any moment. He waved his wand, conjuring up a picture of Relora, their missing werewolf.

"As my letter to all of you stated, last night a group of human magic users, who have gathered in larger and often violent numbers to protest the existence of other magic sentient beings, attacked the last werewolf pack in London.

This is Relora Greywind, she and two of her pack were taken captive by the British Ministry of Magic. Our agreements with most European Ministries, in which they agree to give arrested Akren Alumni over to the AAA for the investigation and sentencing, have been declared null. Anyone one of us who sets foot inside any of these countries is supposed to be arrested. Now we know that Relora is alive right now, but all werewolves are sentenced to death. Because they know she one of us they may try to speed this up, to make a point. Which is why I'm putting a vote on the floor for an immediate expedition to retrieve her and her pack."

Before anyone could begin talking the headmistress got up and walked forward, a flash of light form her wand silenced everyone.

"I know it's been five years since we last assembled for a vote, so for those who haven't been here before. You'll find a voting card under your seat." Rahkesh retrieved his, it was a square paper-thin sheet roughly three times the size of his palm made from green quartz. Options appeared on it as he watched.

_Retrieve Relora Greywind Iimmediately_

_Try to negotiate more with British Ministry_

_Do nothing_

"To vote press your forefinger, either one, to the right of the option you choose." Marvin explained. In the air Relora's picture vanished and the three options appeared with numbers of votes beside them.

Everyone voted for the first option. Everyone. There were some amused chuckles and Rahkesh realized that the Akren mentality couldn't produce anything else in this situation. The vote was merely a formality that hadn't been necessary. Marvin had probably done it because he wanted to seem like he wanted input.

"Very well. It seems we're decided. We'll do this in an extreme way I think. Something suitably dramatic. Those of you who have other things to be doing and don't have the time or wish to participate may leave."

About a third of them left. Most of the City Masters had too much to do in their own territories and left, along with most of the fae. The fauns left one representative, the rest left with all but ten of the centaurs for the other conference hall, they and the animal fae apparently had another discussion going on. All of the werewolves stayed. Those who remained moved down the seats so they could be closer in.

"First off do we have anyone from Lord Hadrian, Master of London here?" Marivn asked.

"Yes." Farov replied, he had eight others with him.

"You'll let us know if any of this would cause him problems." Marvin said. "Now, plans." He continued, rubbing his hands gleefully. "Ideas?"

"I've got six thousand Cornish Pixies that I don't have a use for." A mortal woman volunteered. "I was examining their interactions with some plants, but it didn't work out and I've been breeding them for ten years."

Oh, this was going to be fun, Rahkesh decided. So much fun. Should he offer to melt the place in his animagus? He held back for the moment. His form was no secret, as much as he had tried to keep it one Rahkesh was certain someone would have found out. No one had said anything because that would have revealed knowledge, and a possible source, and let others know, and that just wasn't done. Keeping him uncertain as to who knew gave others some sort of advantage.

"I'd be happy to take down the wards, I understand the Ateres vampires left an opening when they destroyed one of the Departments not long ago?" A very old Amadan asked. He was their best thread magic expert – he also couldn't do _any _other magic. Just thread magic, he even had to use it to reach his animagus form. Rahkesh had once thought about consulting him about his problems with threadmagic, but he didn't think the old recluse would want to be bothered by a new student.

"We can also volunteer an explosive devise that will turn anyone caught in its magic into a muggle. It only works once, but we have no other immediate use for, and so volunteer it for this attack." Sierra offered.

"The Illusionists Guild can volunteer twenty of our members." A werewolf seated behind Rahkehs offered. Across the room the Illusionists, numbering about two hundred, voiced their agreement.

"Before we go any further I have an announcment from the Goblin Nations." A gruff voice called out. Everyone's head swung around, the Goblin Nations Council was all that remained of the many nation sof goblins that had once existed. After several wars with humans they had been removed and their population brought so low that they couldn't fight anymore. The remnants of the species had banded together to take over banking in the countries that they had once freely inhabited. As their governing body they weren't supposed to exist. After the last goblin rebellion the treaty had outlawed any governing council, but no one here was going to say anything about that. An official looking goblin stepped out onto the floor. "The Gringotts Goblins are ready to shut down the banks in the anti-magical creature nations starting tomorrow morning."

-

-

Yeah, had to stop there. Sorry about the wait, I hope I'll have time over winter break to write several chapters.

I had hoped to get both Ron and Draco worked out this chapter, but I decided to separate the planning from the action and have them next chapter.

Distances given in this chapter were not entirely metric (I'm American, we're slow on stuff like that.) However if more of my readers would prefer I can switch (I'm a science major, we use metric.) so please say so if you have a preference. I personally don't care, I was going to use metric but that got a few unhappy comments the last time I tried it, and no apparent approval. Does anyone really care?


	6. Chapter 6

"My brother is so jealous; I get to have fun beating the shit out of dumber-than-Cheez Whiz Brits, while he has to testify at a trial." Ally smirked, waving to her older brother, who was glowering at her from under his shockingly blond hair. The rest of her family was chatting with a trio of goblins, probably about their bank accounts. The goblins had agreed to allow Akren graduates and students continued access. Since only the banks in Europe would be closed Rahkesh wasn't concerned about his.

"I resent that." Rahkesh complained, wondering what Cheez Whiz was, some American muggle thing? He'd never heard the Durselys talk about it. Sounded a bit nasty though.

"Sorry, I meant the ones that are still legal, law-abiding citizens." Ally replied. They needed some inconspicuous people to wander around London before hand to spot anything unusual, and Ally had agreed to play the part of a tourist. Personally, Rahkesh thought that given the political climate, an American tourist in London would stand out like a snowflake in the Sahara. Ally claimed she could always pretend to be some radical outcast visiting to meet the anti-dark magic clubs.

"What's the trial for?" Silas asked.

"Some turd from one of our remaining radical anti-magical being groups tried to kill a werewolf. Genius did it in front of a surveillance camera, and left his fingerprints everywhere, and the werewolf is alive." Ally said. "The best part is that American prisons don't separate by species, and the guards are fully behind our new species integration program. This means anyone arrested for hate crimes somehow gets put in a cell with a vampire or werewolf."

"Almost makes you want to get arrested, for the opportunities." Silas said.

"Those of us who are successful hunters don't need to." Daray said disapprovingly. The whole group rolled their eyes. Vampires constantly competed to see who was the better hunter. No one complained much because they'd rather vampires compete over that than be constantly fighting each other and spraying blood over the walls.

"He hates testifying, he'd prefer to just send in a report. And after lunch he gets to mediate between feuding vampire families. One of our werewolf classmates, Eric, killed Atalia, her family is angry that he did it in front of muggles."

"Not that she's dead, but that she was killed in front of muggles?" Rahkesh asked.

"Well I'm sure they didn't have high expectations of her survival, with her attitude they'd probably assumed she'd never graduate anyway." Silas said. "How'd Eric do it?"

"Something about the muggle sewer system in Seattle." Ally said with a shrug, "I'll ask, sounds creative."

Rahkesh felt a vague presence settle against his mental barriers. He searched it out and instantly caught the feel of professor Namach's magic. The ancient vampire was rather unique. He lowered the defenses on his mind just enough to receive a message, and not enough for the ancient's magic to knock him unconscious. He instantly received a signal that he, Silas, and Daray needed to get back to the school. There were some vampires there claiming to have seen demons.

Rahkesh looked over at the two vampires, who nodded. They had received the message. Rahkesh sent back an agreement. Shaking his head to clear it of the over-powering dark purring from Namach's magic, he called their Hell's Steeds with a touch of magic. Few people willingly communicated telepathically with the ancient if they could avoid it, it was rather uncomfortable, too much, too intense power.

"Well?" Ally asked. She had noted their momentary silence.

"Message from professor Namach. I'll see you tomorrow?" Rahkesh asked.

"Madam Malkin's rendezvous site, then the Ministry Information Desk." Ally agreed. Rahkesh left with Silas and Daray, getting their horses and urging them to a run. They dodged past the two Cerberus at the doors and raced towards the school.

"You known, those would be a lot faster." Daray said, gesturing upwards to half a hundred chariots pulled by rocs streaming out from the upper level stable above the carving of the three headed dog. The meeting had lasted for hours, discussing strategies. Most of his homeland was going to be quite upset by the time Akren was done with the Ministry. It didn't take much these days to get everyone riled up. Rahkesh had a feeling that even what they were about to do wouldn't be enough to change any minds from fear, but it had been so long since their school had reminded the world at large of their existence. If Relora hadn't been taken and some over-zealous official hadn't found that treaty while looking for anymore anti-magical being legislation to pass they would have continued on unaware of Akren's existence. The vast majority of the general public in Europe had forgotten their existence. Even so, treaties must be honored, and keeping Relora and scheduling her execution was most definitely against the AAA's treaty with Britain.

They skipped the tunnel through the mountains into Akren, opting instead for the portkey. Taking them and their horses directly to the school. Occasionally Akren's distance from the valley entrance was a nuisance.

Akren as almost empty, everyone was meeting at Mount Cerberus, or headed home now that the decision had been reached. In the absence of anyone else around several jackalopes, the magical antlered hares, had moved in and were trimming the grass out front. They scattered before the firehorses crashing hooves, leaping away from the flying sparks in terror, ears laid flat as they raced for cover. The horses snorted their amusement, stood still just long enough for their riders to get off, then raced off after the fleeing jackalopes, chasing them through the thick grass. Though they weren't agile enough to ever catch them. The jackalopes dodged between their hooves and jumped out of the way of the flying sparks. The horses neighing and kicking up clods of grass as they pounced after them.

The school was silent, empty. Rahkesh had never seen it so empty. Even the magical plants that usually cast their gold and silvery glows over the hallways seemed to be sleeping. The only light coming from the crystal and candle light displays that patterned walls in ropes of gold, green and purple.

The doors to Namach's room were open, and Eli greeted them, hissing furiously at Rahkesh and moving out of the way only when he stepped back and pushed Silas through first. Namach had removed his fireplace, turning it into wall and bookcase again for the summer, and added a couch and armchair in front of where it had been. He was sitting alone in one of the arm chairs, examining bits of shattered bloodmetal that sat in a silver pan on the low ornate table, wearing a light silver, red, and black sleeveless tunic, black pants, black bloodmetal arm guards with silver and black gloves and heavy black boots. There no sign of anyone else, though the shattered bloodmetal on the silver pan smelled metallic, and dead. Rahkesh guessed he had gotten rid of his elf friend while Daray was around, not wanting the elf to attack and kill him. Rahkesh had gotten the impression Ferraidar would ask questions only after Daray was dead.

Namach wandlessly called out two goblets of blood for the younger vampires, then tossed Rahkesh a letter. Rahkesh glanced quickly at the name: Fayina Shiila. She was the manager of a vampiric business in Russia that specialized in mixing different bloods. Much like muggle or magic folk with different drinks, vampires mixed bloods. Fayina's brands were the most popular in Asia. She was also one of parselmouths he'd contacted about writing a book for the masses about the true nature of that magic. There were few parselmouths, and the mortals he knew of weren't ready to risk it, even if they did all live in the more tolerant countries. The handful of vampires he'd contacted had all referred him to Fayina. She'd agreed that it was about time. She'd collected opinions from all the others she knew of and had started on the book. She had also promised to let him know when she was about done with the technical parts of it. She wanted Rahkesh to review it and fix anything that might make it easier for frightened mortals to follow.

Eli stalked up on Rahkesh growling, raising his frill and glaring, his tail lashing around like an angry cat's until Rahkesh called up the thunderbird to crackle at him and make him back off. The big lizard did so grudgingly, hissing and smacking his tail spikes loudly on the floor.

"If he's your familiar why can't you ask him why he hates me?" Rahkesh asked the ancient vampire seated in an armchair across the sitting room from them. Namach glanced up from the slivers of bloodmetal and smirked.

"I have, he said you smell wrong." Namach said, Daray laughed and clapped Rahkesh on the shoulder.

"Hear that? You smell bad. Bet that's the first time a lizard's ever confirmed it." Rahkesh cuffed him over the head and walked around Eli to the couch. Sygra twisted off his arm a little to hiss at Eli rudely. _She _thought he smelled fine.

"What's happened?" He asked. Namach waved Silas and Daray to sit.

"I received a message today from Sven, the Master of Belize - he has the whole country as his territory." Namach added, for Rahkesh, who did not have the names and personalities of every master vampire memorized. He refused to do that, he liked his mortal world and wasn't about to show that much interest in any other species, especially now since the vampires seemed to want to turn him. Namach continued "He's been leading up a small group of Central American vampires trying to find this insane crackpot whose been on a killing spree since…oh…about last winter. He's left a trail of some three and a half thousand corpses across Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I think they're getting a little tired of it. He's avoided El Salvador completely, probably because that's Anandi's territory, and she keeps her vampire population very low, and she's scarier than this psychopath is. Originally no one minded what he was doing because he was only killing of non-magic vampires who didn't have any permission to exist anyway and weren't at all useful. But then he went and killed off one of Sven's cousins. Sven started investigating and began finding some very strange and disturbing things. There's always bodies left behind, or at least blood, but when someone actually bothered to look closely they found that none of the bodies were vampires, though the blood was." He paused to let them chew on that.

"How'd he manage that?" Daray finally asked.

"That's what got Sven so concerned. He gathered his vampires and called in a few others from other countries. I understand your grandmother has secretly been helping, which would explain where the rest of the Ateres clan had vanished to some months ago. It's a relief to know where they were and what they were up to – some of us were getting concerned for our safety" Namach added the last with a smirk. Undoubtedly others had asked him for help locating the missing Ateres, since Namach was probably the only one safe form ever being targeted. Rahkesh raised an eyebrow at his friends, he hadn't heard about any of that.

Daray shrugged. "Best not to ask when a good portion of the family disappears; obviously they're going after someone or something."

"Well they tracked down every kill, and then trailed this old one to his most recent kill. While they were in the area they found a massive spark of an unknown type of magic. They compared it to the kills and found it was the same. With a little hunting from some trained magic trackers they found others bits of this magic, dulled and hidden but existent nonetheless. They found the easiest source, when they broke through into the cave they found a massive altar and a gold-lined pool of glowing blood…and demonic magics runes thrown across the walls."

"We're so screwed." Silas muttered. Namach nodded his agreement.

"Cyala was going to be here to tell you herself, but she cancelled, they've just found a second altar. They left a surveillance device and closed the place, hiding their entrance. The next time the vampire returned they caught it on tape. They didn't get him – he's warded with magics to stop anyone from seeing him, but they certainly got a look at what he was doing, before he destroyed the camera. He hasn't been killing vampires; he's been taking them alive and sending them into the demon realm."

Oh, that was bad, that was really bad. Demons didn't want to take over the world to rule it – they couldn't withstand sunlight enough for that – they wanted it as a source for slaves. That had been the discovery that had led to the creation of the Seven Seals that kept their magical realm contained and separated. Everyone knew that there was, at most, one seal left, or maybe none. Unfortunately the magic that had created them had been destroyed by the demons in such a way that they couldn't be sealed off again. Not in the same way they had been. They had been driven back behind the Seals in the last battle of Atlantis, which had ended that civilization…though there was some debate about the actual cause. Before that they had wiped out every fully sentient species to ever live on earth. The two civilizations that had existed before Atlantis had fallen - and the species gone extinct, in wars with the demons. Rahkesh didn't fancy seeing his world go the same way.

"Why would anyone help them?" Silas asked. "Unless they're a member of a doomsday cult, it seems counter to anyone's long term survival strategy."

"We have no idea." Namach said, "Sven has assumed blackmail, I'm not so sure, might be a religious thing, or, as you said, a doomsday cult."

"Tell me, how much do the elves know?" Rahkesh asked.

"Nothing." Namach replied, "and it will stay that way for the moment, though not for long. Actually I have a feeling they already know and haven't let on. They don't miss much. Why they would not interfere yet I don't know, there's something going on with them that's awfully strange anyway. Obviously they wouldn't let any of us in on their plans. I'll see what I can do there. At least there's no logical way to link this to you." He said to Daray. "Elves are nothing if not logical. And I'm getting more interested in just what they're up to. I've been making some progress on our missing druid Akanthos, and the elves were definitely there about when he vanished.

Now I called you here because we need to know the process you observed for summoning demons. We may be able to combine what we can learn from that with the ritual we now know for going through the other way. We can't do anything about the Seven Seals, since they're probably all gone by now, if so many demons are coming through, but perhaps we can destroy the portals."

"We can give you a copy of our memories. When the demons first came through they were weak and hungry, the first thing they did was feed. The people they fed on, I believe that they were magical. There's been a search recently for a large number of people who went missing shortly before Voldemort summoned demons. It may be that without magical prey immediately they'll be very weak and may not even survive the transportation." Rahkesh mused. The Daily Prophet had been running articles about nearly a hundred abductions, in France, on the same night. Which happened to be the night before the demon attacks in London.

Namach summoned over a pensieve, they each put their memories in it. Daray had already given a record of everything he remembered from his time spent locked in the demon's mind. It hadn't been much; the demon had been very good at hiding its mind.

"How likely is it that we're facing an all out war with the demons and these few are just scouts, disguising their purpose as something else to gain entry?" Rahkesh asked. Namach sighed and thought that over.

"Well, technically none of the other wars ever ended, the demons never surrendered. Sure they were locked away in their realm, but they never stopped fighting. We know that they want this world as a source of slave labor, that's nothing new. How much do you know about that?"

"Basically nothing." Rahkesh replied, Daray and Silas shook their heads.

"Well I can't tell you much more. Only that the demons can't actually live here for any length of time. We know from past wars that they would rather take slaves back to their realm than totally enslave this one. Probably because they just can't control this realm well enough. What is often left out of the records is that demons don't want muggle slaves. We can only guess as to why but most likely its because muggles don't taste as good, they have shorter life spans, lower physical endurance, and no healing magics. The demons want magical beings, mortal humans, werewolves, vampires, fae, whatever, they're not picky."

"Well that means we might be able to fight this without the muggles finding out. The demons are probably unsure about them and their technology; they won't want the muggles finding out about them anymore than we do." Rahkesh said.

"More likely they would keep the muggles ignorant to stop any trouble, and just remove any muggle-born witches and wizards." Daray said gloomily. "If you want to build a civilization on a magical slave labor force, while eating them, you need a constant source of new people. Werewolves and fae breed only slowly, and vampires can't at all, only humans do."

_How very nice_ Sygra muttered in Rahkesh's ear, from her position over the back of the couch. _More to worry about._ Rahkesh however had just had an idea. They didn't know anything about demons now, probably not enough to fight effectively…but he had a hunch he knew someone who knew _a lot _about them.

"Sir, if Sharahak was in the demon realm, for whatever reason, wouldn't that make him inaccessible to our link?"

XXX

"And you're sure this won't set off the alarms?" Rahkesh asked again, for the third time. He did not want to be the one responsible for setting of the Ministry's alarm system.

"Yes. Uncle Grath and I dropped by earlier and tested it." Silas assured him. "But don't tell anyone about that would you? We're supposed to stay out until later."

Marvin Gale had finished the meeting the night before by asking everyone to stay away from the Ministry until the planned attack. Grath must have been very sure about this plan not setting off the alarms to go and test it. The Ateres might be one of the most powerful vampire families to ever exist but even they weren't going to upset the AAA and the Akren Headmistress unnecessarily – they might wind up banned from the school.

"Very well. On one condition." Rahkesh finally agreed.

"What?"

"You bring a camera." Rahkesh said. Silas and Daray started laughing. "I want photos of this. Oh, and you have to promise not to sting me."

"Obviously." Silas chuckled, "I'll be careful."

Silas had stayed over the night before, Ally would be arriving with the rest of the Akren attack force in a few hours. They hadn't had much time to do any more information gathering on demons, no one had. But with the news of what was really happening with the still-unknown vampire in Central America they had taken the night to get some work done. The Ateres had managed to find a variety of sources for demon information over the past few weeks, and with a new urgency had begun working through it. The three had stayed up all night working out lists of differences and similarities between Daray, Sharahak, Namach's demon skeleton and his dissection notes along with all the internal organs and pieces, two anatomical sketches dragged out of one of the Ateres libraries, a skin on loan from Alonae Shir'an Master of Puerto Rico, a set of perfectly preserved brains (three) that Namach had managed to talk Anandi of El Salvador into letting them borrow and examine, a pair of wings – just the wings – from Aliri Mshai (Master of Luanda, Angola) and two mounted demon heads from Kamenwati (Master of Cairo, Egypt). The two City Masters were half-brothers and had inherited the pieces from their creator, now dead.

Anandi had threatened to disembowel them if anything happened to her display pieces, usually kept in her office. So magical tests were mostly out of the question, in case the three brains exploded when hit with non-demon magic. But they had weighed and measured everything. Norovosi of the Ateres family was arranging for a DNA comparison of tiny bits taken from each demon – they hadn't told Anandi about that and figured she wouldn't notice such a tiny slice being removed. So far they had matched one of the heads and one of the anatomical sketches to the set of wings, and the skin and second sketch to the other head. Meaning they really only had Daray, Sharahak, Namach's skeleton and pieces, three disembodied brains, one demon with the head, wings and internal organs diagrams, the other with the head, skin, and internal organs diagrams. Eight demons, not enough for a real study, but all they were likely to get, unless the elves let them take a look at whatever they had, unlikely. Sharahak was only in the journal compiled by the Chachapoyaro and copied by Daray. Their total was one whole living demon, three with most of their parts, diagrams and notes on Sharahak, and three brains. Not enough for a good investigation, but enough for a start.

They already knew from the examinations of the Akren staff that Daray was attempting to go through the final metamorphosis into an adult form, and that Sharahak had also been a subadult. Major skeletal differences had been found between the two heads, Namach's skeleton, Daray, and Sharahak. They'd been able to put Sharahak, the skeleton, and one of the heads into one type of demon, Daray as another type, and the last head as a third type. The three brains had all been of the same weight and size and density, but were different from any of the other remains. Of them all only the demon with its wings and head left was an adult.

Not much for results, but since the potions created by Tashanna, the Ateres best potions Master, Daray was managing to suppress the demon's transformation urges fairly well. They had some time to try to figure this out. There were enough magical residues on the skeleton and both heads to do a comparison, but given that Daray was a different variety of demon it probably wouldn't help. Namach was still maintaining that from what he could sense Daray's transformation would only be magical.

The Ateres were preparing for a more thorough look at the demon remains; they were currently waiting for the bodies of the demons killed during the attack on Moody's home. The bodies had been so reactive to any attempts at magical movement that they couldn't even get through the wards into Hadrian's vaults with causing a minor earthquake. Kylara Ateres was monitoring the bodies, and had noted that whatever magic had been keeping them in one place was vanishing quickly. Daray had pointed out that the demon whose body he had had extremely edgy spastic magic when he first joined its mind. However that had calmed noticeably during the hours they had remained connected. Sharahak had reported a similar occurrence. The Chachapoyaro had theorized that the process of passing into this world left the demons magically charged, and not in a good way. Since the bodies in Hadrian's vault were recently summoned they would still be releasing the left over summoning magic into the world around them. Not in large enough quantities to harm his vaults, but enough so that their cells, even dead, reacted to unfamiliar magic. The Ateres were hoping that at least one of the dead demons would be similar to Daray, even better if it was an adult, though unlikely, and how would they tell if it was?

The thing they were all really hoping for was that Namach would get the elves to lighten up a little and let them in on what they knew. Namach had pointed out more than once that the elves and demons had been at war since before the demons first appeared on Earth. That had been several million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. If the elves and demons had been fighting that long surely the elves knew just about everything there was to know about demons. Since both demons and elves came from another universe entirely they had probably been interacting, even if it was only at war, for a very long time, possibly since before the elves and Death Dragons combined species. The problem was that the elves were notorious for their homicidal tendencies and few were brave enough to ask questions. Namach, having hit a wall months ago when he started asking around, had finally called in Cyala to come up with some plan for getting the elves to talk.

Rahkesh looked up as he heard footsteps near the top of stairs. Draco was up, probably wondering what they were doing. It was well before dawn. Draco came down, looking around curiously, then stopping, clearly worried about crossing the room, which would mean moving between Daray and Silas. Both vampires leered at him. Rahkesh rolled his eyes around; they were like cats after a canary with a broken wing.

"We are allowed to erase his memory before Mariah takes him back right?" Daray asked. He didn't really have any reason to fear Mariah, but vampires never let anyone know anything about them without a fuss. Since Draco had been around when they had been discussing bloodmagic Daray wouldn't want him remembering anything.

"Does it really matter if she knows what your most recent set of rituals was?" Rahkesh asked. Wondering if this might just be enough to get Draco to, at least, run.

"Yes."

"Why? Embarrassed that my suggestion of planned electrocution worked?" Rahkesh smirked. He had dared Daray to give it a try. The vampire had been most upset when he incorporated Rahkesh's suggestion in his plans, and found it provided the missing linking and stabilizing piece his new bloodmagic needed.

"Shut up Thunder. I'm more concerned about someone else reading his mind if she sells him." Daray growled. Draco came in and Daray got up, drawing his wand.

"Now?"

"Yes. That way I have time to repeat it several times before she gets here this evening."

"You realize that since he belongs to Mariah your magics might just bounce off him?" Rahkesh asked, Draco had drawn back against the wall and was looking like he might faint. Daray paused.

"Good point. Even if she does it unconsciously her magic is still all over him."

"You might wind up erasing everything, I doubt she'd approve if he came back mindless." Rahkesh warned. Draco looked around for a way out, panicked.

"There are ways around that." Daray said, he grabbed Draco and went to bite him.

Draco reeled back and punched Daray in the face.

Daray hadn't been expecting the hit, and bounced backward against the wall. Silas and Rahkesh traded broad grins, about time. Draco slumped backwards, deathly pale and shaking. Apparently just realizing what he'd done.

Daray shook his head for a moment, blinked at Draco, and started laughing. His deep ringing laughter snapping Draco back to reality, just before he fell over.

"The little mortal has some spine after all!" he laughed, clapping Draco on the shoulder and dragging him into the sitting room. "Good punch!" Apparently Rahkesh had been correct thinking that Daray would love it if Draco finally snapped and hit back.

Draco looked back and forth between the three of them, confused. Rahkesh smiled and waved him over to the table where he'd left breakfast.

"I was hoping you'd do that. It really is the only way to get him to stop." He explained.

"Y-you're not angry?" Draco asked cautiously.

"No of course not. The whole point of bringing you here was getting you to stand up for yourself a little." Rahkesh explained gently.

"He was desperately in need of a good punch or two." Silas agreed. Daray's nose wasn't even bleeding and there would be no bruise, he was a vampire. But that didn't matter. Mariah was going to be very pleased, even if her high hopes for Draco would never happen. As Rahkesh watched Draco looked around at Daray again, Daray was still laughing. Draco smiled a little to himself and pulled over a plate of eggs, not asking permission to eat this time.

"Given the potions he's been taking it won't matter if you don't erase his memory, he can't say anything to anyone anyway." Rahkesh reminded Daray. Draco had been drinking potions daily so that he would be unable to tell anyone about anything he heard or saw, ever. The same potions blocked mind reading and telepathy. Daray had apparently forgotten, since he blinked then nodded.

"Why didn't you just remind me of that in the first place?"

"I was hoping you would push him far enough that he'd fight back." Rahkesh said.

Draco ate silently, not looking up at any of them, though he sneaked occasionally glances at the vampire when he thought they weren't looking. He seemed more thoughtful than terrified, which Rahkesh took as a good sign. It had taken a while but something of the old Draco Malfoy was appearing in his eyes. Daray seemed to have completely forgotten about being punched by a mortal and was absorbed in conversation with Silas about who would get the right to execute the rogue vampire working with the demons in Central America. Rahkesh could almost see the fights the vampires would get into over who got to kill him.

"Mariah will be by a little after noon." Rahkesh told Draco, who startled and blinked rapidly, apparently having been off in his won world.

"Ah. Do…do you really think she'd sell me?" Draco asked in a rush, some of the old terror returning. Rahkesh wondered what exactly Voldemort pack of illegal vampires had done to him, this fear hadn't come from Mariah.

"I don't know. I know she's looking for research assistants with working brains who are interested in dragons, and that she has a history of freeing slaves who work well. If you can make her think you're worth training she won't sell you." Rahkesh said slowly. The Draco Malfoy he'd known would never have done something like that, but the young man sitting across the table from him was a very different person. Extensive torture could do that.

"You'd better hope she doesn't sell you. Farov's already said he's interested, and he is one sick bastard." Silas said.

"I've heard his after-dinner shows are very nice." Daray retorted. "There's a reason why Hadrian usually lets him provide most of the entertainers at any meetings."

"Lord Hadrian keeps him under control, sometimes. But Farov doesn't free his slaves, unless Lord Hadrian makes him."

"I doubt you'd actually find those shows amusing Daray." Rahkesh said. As much as Daray might claim to not have anything resembling morals (and most of the time he genuinely didn't) he did have some standards. Most vampires weren't as repulsive as they pretended to be. Most. And being vampires they usually didn't protest anyone else's actions unless they were truly extraordinarily awful. "I've heard from a few alumni what goes on there. I think even you would protest some of it. Farov has to be careful of who's in the audience, last time he forgot to someone tried to kill him, under the argument of his degrading the human species."

Draco was starting to look ill. He'd probably be trying very hard to make sure Mariah didn't sell him. Rahkesh felt the back of one of his earrings spark. While the front was an obsidian chip that contained his trunk the back of each earring connected to his assortment of communication mirrors and hippocampus viewing sheets. He left a very thoughtful Draco thinking over his options while the vampire went back tot heir previous conversation. None of them noticed him leave.

In his room his abinari, the hippocampus-hair viewer that connected to the one Moody owned, was glowing. Rahkesh activated it with a few drops of blood. Regulus and Shacklebolt's faces appeared.

"Morning, did we wake you?" Regulus asked.

"No. I've been up. Preparing. You got my message last night."

"About the demons. I suppose as soon as Voldemort is gone we'll be at war with them." Shacklebolt said gloomily.

"You know my girlfriend and I were hoping to get married sometime this year." Regulus muttered.

"I don't know how much help you'd be with the demons. Most of the stuff we're looking into is bloodmagic and necromancy with a little soul magic thrown in." Rahkesh said. Regulus was anxious to get back to the life he'd made after fleeing the death eaters. "The other message? About the attack on the Ministry this morning."

"Yeah. About that. We've got some very good news." Regulus said, grinning in the maniacal way Sirius used to.

"Oh?"

"We found the locket."

XXX

"Clear the street! Clear the street! Move it people! Security coming through!" Someone bellowed. The shoppers in Diagon Alley moved aside as a force of red-robed men and women marched through in formation. As they passed people rolled their eyes and a few made rude gestures.

"Why are they such snots? I know we need protection from dark beings but you'd think they ruled the world or something." Someone muttered.

Rahkesh listened to the complaints with hope, but all that was lost when he caught sight of the speaker, marching beside the man who appeared to be the leader of the group (he had gold symbols on his shoulders), Ronald Weasely. Apparently still playing lackey to those more powerful than himself. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Ron liked having authority over others, and was irresponsible. He was the one doing the shouting and strutting about, the actual leader just looked vaguely amused at Ron's display. Ron looked ridiculous, red robes with red hair, still uncoordinated, puffing his chest out and bellowing and strutting around. Rahkesh winced. Well he knew where Ron was going to be – the group was headed towards one of the Diagon Alley security entrances to the Ministry.

For a moment Rahkesh wished he could warn Ron, but that would be ignored. And, really, he and Ron were now complete opposites, on different sides of a war. And Rahkesh's loyalty to Akren mattered more, and he didn't really have any sympathy for Ron, he was old enough to make his own choices.

Rahkesh lifted his cup of lemonade and whispered into the ring he was wearing.

"We're in luck, there's a group of those vigilante citizen guards headed into the Ministry – Diagon Alley security wing. The fellows dressed in bright red like moving targets. Just a hunch, but this group was involved in the attack."

"Acknowledged." A voice replied in his ear, "we're inside and in position, take the entrance by the Information Desk. You really think these ones were involved?"

Rahkesh paused as he crossed the street, studying a small map of the Alley he was holding, acting lost. If he said he thought Ron's group was involved, which he did think to be true – Dean had been watching Ron and his group hadn't been present in any of their usual pubs that night – then it could mean Ron's life. He'd be meeting with Hermione and her group soon. It was supposed to be a fun meeting; he hadn't seen any of them in some time. Having to answer questions about how Ron died…but it would be something he couldn't talk about because it was an Akren operation.

More than anything else though Rahkesh realized that if it had been anyone but Ron, he wouldn't have hesitated, and that bothered him. He and Ron were not friends, and probably wouldn't be ever again. Ron's views and Rahkesh's were opposites and he doubted Ron would change. He had thought Ron had gotten over his issues with werewolves after meeting Remus, but apparently not. Ron's mind was easily swayed and, with his love of the spotlight and self-righteousness he was, if anything, a liability to anyone he worked with. Ron had nothing to offer that was worth saving his life for. It might actually be easier on his family if he was removed now, though Molly's grief would be horrible. Ron had become cannon-fodder in a war he didn't understand, a rather mindless follower, and Rahkesh doubted he'd be able to make Ron see sense now.

"Yes, I'm sure. I've got the son of a Ministry friend watching that group." He finally said. Lying a little as to the person, but that would be understood – you never gave away informants. As one of the few Akren students who was a local it hadn't surprised the attack leader when he'd explained he had gathered a few allies to keep him informed. No questions had been asked; when it came to defending each other Akren graduates trusted each other's networks, if someone came up as faulty they'd be blamed afterward, but not questioned until there was evidence.

"Very well, we'll take them all. All units- if possible capture the youngest dozen. Lord Hadrian requested a few of the young ones."

Rahkesh winced, checked his disguise in the window of a closed shop, and then headed for the entrance. Ron had decided his fate when he'd ignored Hermione's warnings about what was coming, and what his adversaries were capable of. Rahkesh had no more time to think of him.

Ally appeared from Madam Malkins, followed by Audrey, another mortal student who was working on her mind magics mastery and as a mediwitch. Both had just gotten British-style robes so they fit in. Not that it was important, but any Akren student or graduate could be counted on to have at least one set of clothes that fit any country they might have regular reason for traveling to, to fit in better. Meticulously labeled and stored away in some closet. There were times when appearing to be a foreigner was useful, and times when it was a problem. Visual inspection came first with people everywhere; if you looked like you belonged you weren't remembered. Rahkesh had sets of robes from a dozen countries in one of the two earrings he wore everywhere.

They both moved over towards the Diagon Alley entrance to the Ministry Information Desk, Alley holding a book (this being Ally it was a transfigured knife), a gesturing while they talked. A perfectly normal pair of young women out shopping. Rahkesh, acting lost and turning his map around, holding it up to compare to the walkway to the Ministry entrance, followed at a short distance. The Ministry had been cutting down on its entrances and exits for security reasons, so it didn't take very many of people to cover all of them. This one had been created to reassure the citizens that dark magic wasn't taking over the world, or some such nonsense. All morning others had been working their way inside in small groups, and finding ways to stay hidden and go unnoticed. By now there were nearly a hundred of them in and about the Ministry of Magic.

Once inside Rahkesh asked at the desk for directions to the best entrance of muggle London, then for the nearest bathroom. He met Ally and Audrey in the hallway and they all headed towards the small museum that was supposed to impress tourists, but was really just a collection of junk. The best stuff had gotten stolen over the years or moved to more secure museums elsewhere. Wandering among the displays they noted four others, and two more seated outside the small guardroom.

"Team one has entered the cell block." The voice came from the tiny chip glued to the inside of his ear, looking like an earring.

"Team two at west cell block entrance. Guards are down, no alarm given."

"Team three at east cell block entrance, guards down, no alarms."

Now they had to wait until someone located the timetable for executions. Relora wasn't scheduled until later that day, but the Department for the Disposal of Dark Magical Beings tended to move their victims around constantly. Someone somewhere had thought it would be a mercy to the poor creatures, leave them no time to connect with cellmates.

Rahkesh separated from the others and wandered over to the far corner of the museum. Here a tall glass and silver case stood alone with a light on it. Inside was a heavy gold locket inscribed with an S. A slip of paper beside the locket read

Golden locket presumed to belong to Salazar Slytherin, one of the four Founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. 

Note: This object's authenticity has not yet been verified.

Here it was, after months of searching the far corners of various countries it had been here in the Ministry all along. Mundungus Fletcher had sold it to someone who had died a horrible death (he melted) while wearing it and it had been confiscated by the Department of Mysteries. They, deciding it was cursed, but not being able to verify whether it had belonged to Slytherin, and not wanting it to fall into the hands of the Ateres vampires, had put it in the museum. Since it might be a fake – Hepzibah Smith being conveniently dead – the likelihood of anyone trying to steal it was fairly low.

The best part was that Rahkesh already knew how to destroy it. He just needed a vampire and a dementor. Lord Hadrian had said he would give him one of Voldemort's vampires that he had captured, with no questions asked. Hadrian knew that Rahkesh was working with Moody to get rid of Voldemort, and hadn't asked anything else, he had enough problems to deal with. The dementor might be a bit harder to get, since they had all abandoned Azkaban and joined Voldemort.

The glass was enchanted to block spells by the auror assigned to the museum, not the Unspeakables, and as a result wasn't particularly high quality. However the ward against spells was very strong, so Rahkesh didn't use a spell. He focused on the locket, and used wandless magic. Acid melted the glass roof off the low case. The roof was the focus and without it the bottom of the cube-shaped wards would also fail, while leaving the sides functioning. Rahkesh could feel that the ward was attached to the four silver bars that held the glass structure together, which made sense, glass didn't hold enchantments well. The ward locked onto the silver bars created a box, anything moving into or out of the box would be noticed. Rahkesh caught the glass wandlessly before the roof fell in, and slowly transfigured it until it was a lump and he could clearly see the locket. The wards covering the locket like a blanket and rippled aside with the removal of the roof. But he couldn't reach down through, that would break the top edge of the wards, despite the glass being gone the wards were still there. Only the bottom layer had responded. The wards rippling apart like the glass on the roof had. The top wards where the roof had been were more attached since the roof was the focus, and the little cubes carved onto the silver bars were near the top of the bars, and at the middle, with none near the base. An oversight that was going to cost whoever had messed up.

Next to trick the wards as the locket passed through them. The wards were built into the tiny carvings of cubes on the silver bars, below the case more wards held the base secure and the green velvet on which the locket sat. However the upper wards and lower ones, while overlapping, did not connect. Another mistake. With the bottom layer of wards in the cube gone, the locket sat on top of the wards connected to the base. Rahkesh caught the bottom of each of the silver bars and wandlessly lifted them, and the glass walls, until they were high enough that he could slip the locket up over the edges of the ward of the base, and out under the upper wards as he lowered the box. He then slipped in an exact replica, transfigured in a hurry by Remus. It only had to last an hour. On the way out of the Ministry Rahkesh would throw a few curses around. Settling the top box back into its place he put the roof back on, and felt the bottom wards rippled back into place over the locket.

The entire process took only six centimeters of movement, and no one noticed. He had it, finally.

And there could be no doubt that the locket in his hand contained Voldemort's soul fragment. He could feel it humming, and his concealed scar hurt horribly. Though it wasn't bleeding yet. The dark energy and the death that had been used to create it swirled menacingly around the gold locket. It rustled, with a faint hissing, like dry snake skin. Rahkesh put the locket into a small bag in the inside pocket of his robes. Some of the pain from his scar dulled, leaving only an ache and throb.

Rahkesh, Audrey, and Ally took the elevator to the next level, which was also where tours started. Saying they'd gotten lost would be easy. Once past the tour area they turned towards the lunchroom, acting as if they belonged. There were two very bored trainee aurors on guard here. Audrey went inside to join an older graduate eating a late breakfast. If anything happened they would disable the guards and lock everyone they could in the lunchroom.

Getting in wasn't a problem, getting out was. With all the recent security work in the Ministry they wouldn't be able to disguise her much. And while they could transfigure her into something else the werewolf magic would let loose enough to spark the werewolf magic detectors.

Rahkesh and Ally went for the security center, near the heart of the auror complex. Here they could disable all the detectors in the building. They were joined by, one fae, and four other mortals. The teams sent in had been mostly mortal, hoping to escape detection for as long as possible. Of course they wanted to be found eventually, but only when Relora was safe.

Allen Deckard had stolen a wand from an auror who was currently unconscious in a closet. He pressed the back end of the wand to the small black box beside the main door. The doors opened and he and two others disguised as aurors walk in. Rahkesh opened a hidden pocket in his robes and pulled out a small scorpion, and dropped it on the floor.

"Remember, camera." Rahkesh told Silas as he scuttled in after the three, leaving the others in the hall. Ally snickered and more than a few of the others choked back laughter.

Inside Deckard sent the other two off to the sides to positions near the displays of small mirrors showing what was going on in the hallways. The one for the hallway directly outside was already having a "malfunction", it had been cursed by another graduate using threadmagic from outside the building.

Removing the security center could have been done silently, with, say, poisonous fumes. But the whole point of this, aside from saving one of their own, was to make a big deal out of it. The three picked out the mirrors and audio communication spheres – silvery globes spinning in the air beside their mirror

"Accio", the three summoned. Silver sphere leaped through the air, striking each other and exploding, flaring bits of silver and shrieking sounds blasted through the room.

The fourteen aurors inside leaped to their feet, wands drawn. The leader turn to activate the alarms, and found them blasted apart. He whirled and dove for the backup set, a purple spell got there first and it exploded into his face, sending shard into his eyes. With an agonized scream he collapsed to his knees, and was dead from a spine-snapping curse moments later.

The three alumni attacked silently, flicking curses at the slowly responding aurors. This was not a battle for taking prisoners, they were here to kill. Messily. As dramatically as possible, with as much blood spatter as they could manage. They wanted the security center, but they also wanted to shock and horrify, and to cripple the Ministry. Limbs flew off bodies and skulls exploded. A wave of rippling blue fire turned a man to ash in an instant. Horrible shrieks and screams rang off the walls. Waves of fire, seemingly random, built into a pattern, deliberately charring hair and patches of skin, for the smell effect. Puncturing spells hit the guts, spilling foul-smelling digestive juices, which were also burned.

Outside Ally threw a silencing spell over the door, then a blocking charm as brains splattered and bits flew out of the room. The others set to work on further concealment. They weren't ready for people to notice them yet. Spells to block sight, sound and smell, and illusions to give the appearance of normality. Notice-me-not charms just strong enough to send the eye away to avoid scrutiny. They waited until a sharp flare in the wards told them it was over. That done the spells on the door were open enough to move and the others entered.

Akren didn't write treaties lightly, and they expected to keep them as long as they lasted, with no end date written. Vengeance was promised, in writing, for ending a treaty without due warning. The Ministry might shriek and complain, but the written agreement was currently being published in news papers around the world, including the Prophet.

Inside it looked and smelled like a slaughter house, and Rahkesh was grateful the bodies were so mangled that he didn't recognize any faces. Though he doubted he would have known any of them, it had been something he had been a little concerned over. There was also the possibility that one day these memories might be seen by someone or the general public, when people asked for what had happened. Rahkesh didn't want any of the aurors who had left finding out about their former friends' deaths this way.

"Okay, what have we got." Allen muttered, shifting through the mirrors. "Secretary with the execution papers on hallway eleven, heading for the west stairs." He called into their communicators. They had scouted out who would be doing that today by sending in two with orders to watch the judges under disguise as janitors investigating leaky pipes.

And, just like that, they had the Ministry. Almost every room was monitored from here. They could see all the hallways. The prison, with all entrances and exits, the entire Ministry, including the execution chambers, all laid out before them. The others took up stations scanning the mirrors.

"Team two there are three aurors headed your way from the elevator." In the mirror the team spread out in the hallway and slipped into doorways, some of them vanishing under invisibility magics. The aurors walked right into the middle of them. All three were killed in seconds.

"Marielle?" Rahkesh asked. The fae with them was an expert at detecting and seeing through disguises. A magical inheritance of her bloodline that removed most visually obstructive magics. Marielle closed her eyes and Rahkesh noted the spark of bloodmagic runes flaring across her dark gold skin. She had her visual abilities controlled by bloodmagic, so that she didn't constantly see through everything. To see through every ward and disguise constantly would have driven her insane. Marielle opened her eyes, which had switched from soft brown to solid black, and glanced over the mirrors, able to see through disguise and illusions even from them, and picked out the team's positions. To her the Akren signal was a visible bit of magic floating the aura, which to her was fully visible.

"Ralph, you've got a guard, at five o'clock, watching you. Shield and build up the spell on your hair, its flickering." Marielle said quickly. Ralph, waiting for the secretary, immediately did so.

Allen used a mirror to zoom in on the papers the secretary was carrying, switching mirrors to keep up with her. She was picking her nose…Rahkesh began to wonder if anyone in the Ministry ever had any privacy, probably not, and they probably didn't know it. "Rahkesh, Ally, there're two execution chambers in use today. Join Team three and the first. Two floors down, to the left. Through black double doors on the right, the room is the one at the end of the hallway." Allen said, "Relora and another werewolf, not one of ours, are being executed today. Chambers not assigned." Rahkesh and Ally left as one of the others was sending team one to the other chamber. Outside Silas was concealed at the edge of the door, in the shadows. His minor animagus was a very small scorpion, almost invisible, but magical and deadly. If the aurors tried to retake the security center they would have to get through him before bothering those inside.

Downstairs Rahkesh went invisible, while Ally ducked under his cloak. Two guards passed them without a glance.

"I'm going to have to find those Yecks." Ally muttered. "Very useful things, those caps."

"Lasts forever." Rahkesh agreed, invisibility was very hard to manage without either and cloak or a Yeck cap. There was bloodmagic and threadmagic for it, and stone and feather magic, but it was a difficult process. Someday he would have to get back to Hogwarts and ask Albus's painting what method he had used. Yecks lived in Italy as well as the Akren mountains, Albus might have gotten his there.

They found the solid black double doors and went through. The hallway beyond looked like the type of place you'd expect executions to be performed. Ridiculously clean, but the walls were grey and the floor white and the ceiling dingy with age. There was nothing on any of the walls or the floor, and the torches spaced along the walls added light that made the place seem hollow. The doors were numbered, some interrogation rooms, some execution chambers, with different types of executions performed in each. Everywhere was the smell of death and fear. It made his nostrils ache, and the wavering remains of the soft telepathic bursts that usually accompanied death forced Rahkesh to close down his mind behind solid shields. Though they didn't remain long those bits of magic made his telepathic abilities roil like an upset stomach. And he was feeling something else, a drifting sense of calm and behind it endless power and darkness. Sensing death. Rahkesh didn't like that. Being told he had a connection to death was one thing, feeling the barrier between life and death while walking down a hallway was another thing entirely.

"Team three is coming in from your left, through a secret staircase." Allen warned them. A blank section of wall abruptly sank into the floor, soundlessly. Had he not been expecting it Rahkesh would have started casting curses at once. As it was he drew his knife and wand and pressed against the wall, waiting for someone to exit. Ally hit the wall directly across from the doorway. The Akren signal flared along his peripheral senses and he relaxed. Ally put away her black knife, but kept her wand out.

"Grim place." The leader, Janice Morine, muttered as she waved her team out and down the hallway. They were all mortals, dressed in dark grey, dark blue and black, with the look of well-trained experts. Sharp eyes fixing every detail and Rahkehs could feel their minds checking the magics at work around them. They fanned out, looked both ways, the hurried down the hall, checking the window in every door. They all wore black gloves that wouldn't set off wards, and their shoes were made from Silent Cloth, produced by the Amadan, that absorbed sound and left no trace of its presence.

"You've worked together before." Rahkesh stated as they continued, observing their well-coordinated movements. He didn't ask for any explanation, in case they thought it none of his business, but at the same time it was an observation, if they wanted it.

"We're based out of Puerto Rico." Janice replied, waving to her team, "working for the Council of Magical Plant and Animal Trading Management." She explained, referring to an international agreement on trading certain species. Stopping those transporting illegal (usually endangered) species was a dangerous job, but at some point the head of the Japanese Ministry of Magic had noted that Akren produced exactly the people they needed. And so now the control office was staffed entirely by Akren grads, who happily and easily took to tracking down illegal traders across the globe. The Council's agreement to hire enforcers only from Akren had included a requirement that gave the teams the ability to kill poachers. Rahkesh figured he was now with a team of true professionals who could kill as a group with great efficiency. Akren had tossed a group of wolves in with the lambs.

They reached the execution chamber at the end of the hallway. The door was unlocked, with the others watching from the security center they didn't need to leave any guards outside and so everyone went in. If this was the room where Relora was supposed to be executed there would be a lot of people present shortly to witness it, including the Minister and the head of the aurors, with so many people and their guards it could turn into quite a fight.

Inside the execution chamber was massive, much more so than the door suggested. It was a full auditorium with twenty circling rows of maroon seats leading up into the dim torchlight above. Fifteen rows of seats, with gilded railing in front of each row, the chairs cushioned and the carpets thick. The ceiling was carved into curls and swishes, painted gold. In between the carvings was painted an extremely tacky starry sky with constellations. Really needed a new artist and a new coat of paint, the smoke from the torches had darkened everything…though that did cover up the tacky paint job so maybe it was left that intentionally. The ceiling might be awful but the chairs and floor were nice, the walls clean and hung with paintings of old judges, while the torches sat in fancy gold brackets. Definitely way too nice for the purpose of the shiny freshly sharpened guillotine in the center of the circular black marble stage.

"Decapitation? I thought that went out…a few centuries ago…what _are _you Brits?" Ally asked, more curious than disgusted.

"Backward uncivilized son-of-bitches." One of the team muttered, "That's what they are."

"Gee, thanks." Rahkesh grouched. Not terribly insulted, he had a thick skin, but still…

"Ahh, sorry. You're the lucky one who found Akren." Someone apologized as the group spread out. Rahkesh and Ally fell into their pattern easily, checking the two doors along the top row and looking around the walls for anything hidden.

"When was the last checkup?" Rahkesh asked Allen.

"Ten minutes before you arrived." Allen's voice replied in his ears. "They cleaned the floor and sharpened the blade."

"Anyone on their way?" Ally asked.

"Relora and the other werewolf are on the move from the cells to the execution chambers, no idea who's going where." Allen's voice floated out of the communicators.

"HALT!" The doors at the top of the hall slammed open, Rahkesh dove for the floor behind the guillotine as blasts of orange light flashed over his head.

"Allen." He growled into the communicator.

"Must be an unmonitored passageway. Aw shit…end this quick will you, they're on their way…with _both _werewolves and _all _the guards." Allen began calling the other teams, Rahkesh blocked him out and began hurling cursed to collapse the back wall. Over his head the spells turned green, killing curses.

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Some action for ya.

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There have been a lot of OC characters in this fic and the prequel. I've compiled a list of them by species, with a little more information. It is available on my account page. I hope it's helpful. Some of the characters haven't yet been mentioned, or only once in passing, but they're there anyway. And I'll update it as I go along. Let me know if this is useful or at all interesting.


	7. Chapter 7

Very grateful for all reviews. Reviews make my day. Since Shannon mentioned it I realized I've been forgetting to reply to emails. I don't usually spend a lot of time on that, since no one but that reviewer cares, but I'll go back to replying to a few people each chapter.

Puretsubassa – I was wondering who would catch that. You'll find out what's happening with the Ministry soon.

Ssj5 – Yes, he'll be back eventually.

B – Only partially correct. You need either to want to hurt, or to want to heal.

SirMethos – I hate writing romance, and there are enough people all wanting different pairings…I thought I'd just avoid that whole quagmire entirely. No pairing, no one complains.

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If you haven't read the warning before now, do so. Extreme blood, gore and violence ahead. Disturbing, very disturbing. May make you feel ill.

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Chapter 7

"Avada Kedavra!" Rahkesh ducked at the shrieked curse, and since when could a man's voice get that high? It wasn't very well done, he noted as it smashed against the guillotine he was hiding behind. The wood shuddered but didn't splinter. It didn't appear solid; the green was like a sparkler, not a cannonball. Weak. The caster was panicked. But the curse had been cast, and they did indeed want to kill. That would be problematic. Of course, whoever this was, they were a guard and they could fight, therefore the Akren team was supposed to kill him anyway.

"Avada Kedavra!"

"Immobulus!"

"Stupefy!"

"Incendio!"

"Avada Kedavra!"

Blue shields flared in spots around the room, near the aurors, the Akren team was using the furniture for the moment. They had all dropped down, no point in giving the aurors an easy head count with shield glows if they didn't have to yet. Especially since they wouldn't work against the killing curse anyway, and all of them could snap a stunning spell in a blink. Basic combat tactics.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The Ministry had always refused to allow aurors to sue the killing curse. Rahkesh hadn't been aware of any policy change. But perhaps they hadn't broadcast that change to the press yet. Or the Prophet was being censored. The last was far more likely. He'd have to send a note to Luna's father about that.

What was most interesting was that the aurors apparently hated enough to want to kill. The Ministry brainwashing about magical creatures must have been very good to get that level of response. You couldn't just cast a killing curse after all. While Rahkesh and the others waited for the aurors to yell themselves hoarse, a very useful tactic, let them wear themselves out against the furniture, Rahkesh resolved to study the Ministry's propaganda more. It really shouldn't be possible for ALL of these people to want to kill this much.

Janice had her team down hiding amongst the awful maroon seats, which served a better purpose as shields than chairs. They had lifted pieces of the marble floor and were using them as shields to cover their heads. They had stopped responding and were waiting for orders. None of them seemed particularly concerned. Janice just tucked her short brown hair behind an ear and began giving instructions as sharp whistles. Three sharp whistles had her team rolling under the seats and into positions near the isles. One sharp blast and all ten, including Janice, fired off curses at the doors.

The blue light hit the walls beside the doors and burst into bright streak of crackling fire that shattered the walls, collapsing in the doorframes, trapping the aurors in the room with them.

Rahkesh felt Ally at his back, facing the opposite direction. Janice and her group were slowly moving up, row to row among the shredded and cracked maroon chairs.

"Allen, anyone coming down the hall?"

"No." Allen Deckard must work as some sort of fighter, Rahkesh decided; he didn't offer instructions in the middle of a fight, no unnecessary words. Just trusted them to do their job and gave them the information he had. "However both werewolves are being escorted in your direction, with a squad of twenty. I'll alert you when they're in the hallway outside."

Twenty aurors coming soon, twenty guards for two werewolves, just a bit of overkill, perhaps someone was concerned over offending the AAA. This party was about to get bigger. What fun.

Along the upper row of seats the tallest auror (the biggest target) was engulfed in scarlet flames and turned to ash. Bit of charred skin lifted away and his bones crackled into flames as he was eaten alive by the fire. The man standing next to him screamed in terror, making his companions wince, the momentary distraction gave Rahkesh the time to put a knife into the throat of a graying overweight official-looking fellow and blue and gold robes. The screaming man, short blond auror who couldn't have been more than twenty, turned and began attacking the rubbish blocking the secret exit. He was panicking as two more of his companions fell to violet curses that took their limbs off. Feet and arms and heads went bouncing off the walls with dull thuds and rolling down the stairs. His shrieks and bad aim wasted most of the power of his spells, but he was getting through.

If the auror got out and ran for help this would get really bad, and they didn't have Relora yet. Allen's voice came again from the communicator.

"Minister Baines will be attending, he's coming in behind the werewolves and guards. Ten aurors with him."

"Oh joy, an even bigger party." Ally chuckled. "Wasn't he supposed to be in France today?"

"We are to capture him, but not kill." Allen said, sounding most upset. Rahkesh wondered who the orders had come from, and decided Marvin Gales must have a plan of some sort. Or the headmistress did.

"Incendio!"

"Diffindo!"

The blade on the guillotine was getting hot from the spells hitting it and the wood was starting to smoke.

Rahkesh glanced up, confirming what he'd seen earlier during his inspection. The hideously painted ceiling was done in wedge shaped panels. Rahkesh drew a small knife, the blade no more than four inches, and sliced a series of runes into his palms, fingertips, and above each eye to awaken a specific bloodmagic. He'd done this set nearly eight months earlier, but this was the first time he was testing it in battle. The bloodmagic surged and though he could feel nothing change Rahkesh knew the set he had activated was glowing. He knew if he had a mirror he would see thin golden lines appearing on his skin in the runes for this piece, emitting a pale gold glow. Once the runes awoke the bloodmagic began to work and his vision shifted, swaying as if he were drunk and trying to run, then stabilized and he could feel the enchantments on the ceiling. Another brief blurring and they became nearly visible, ripples of moving magic against the roof. Rahkesh reached out magically to sense the purpose the wavering spells that ran over the panels like shifting water. The panels were enchanted to deflect spells. But they could work around that. Rahkesh closed the cuts and the bloodmagic faded.

"Ally, the aurors will try to run, they can't be allowed to alert anyone else. The ceiling is built in panels, bring down the ones above the back doors and cover them. The panels are enchanted so don't spell them, spell the air." Rahkesh said, hoping Ally caught on. She did and immediately selected one of the panels and began casting.

The spells weren't visible as they were cast, but the ceiling shimmered as the air moved to obey the magic, packing itself, building pressure, becoming a hard wedge the sliced the panels from the roof as cleanly as a blade. Rahkesh followed what Ally was doing and cut down a second panel. They released the first spells, and then lifted the air below the panels, catching them as the fell. More air movement magics knocked the panels against the shattered doors just before the auror attacking them broke through.

His scream of terror and rage as he hit the new block was very satisfying. Beside Rahkesh Ally laughed sadistically.

"Sucks to be you." She muttered, and then fired four quick spells in succession. The first three hit at various points across the auror's shield, the fourth zapped right through and cracked his skull open like an egg. Red and grey splattered everywhere with a wet smack and the skull peeled off like bits of eggshell. The auror standing beside the dead man fainted as he looked down to find himself covered in his comrade's brain. A blood-freezing curse from Rahkesh killed him. Rahkesh and Ally stopped while Janice's team began firing purple spells yanked bones right out of the body. Six aurors dropped as their bodies were torn apart and their bones slid grotesquely out of their limbs.

Rahkesh rolled onto his stomach and around the edge of the guillotine. He hurled three spells at the floor the auror team was standing on. These were earth rollers. Designed for farming they made the ground roll abruptly, if you did them right you could make an entire crop of carrots jump up out of the ground. From there they could be summoned with minimal soil disturbance. Here the entire auror team landed flat on their backsides with cries of shock.

Rahkesh jumped upright and threw himself behind the first row of seats, turning he tossed five tiny red marbles behind the massive guillotine. Ally joined him behind the seats and cast an activation spell.

The red marbles dissolved into mist, which grew until it formed five humans, medium height, dark brown hair and grey eyed. Normal faces no one would ever remember, because the features weren't quite solid. Each so perfectly formed Rahkesh couldn't tell they weren't real. The Illusionists Guild had done their work well. The five replicas, now controlled by the Illusionists, ducked behind the guillotine. Inside each fake human the remains of the red marble were drawing on the power given off each time a spell hit the guillotine. The Illusionists had equipped their puppets so that they could cast spells. This involved some of the most difficult magic work in existence, and even with the entire Guild the spells were limited to stunners, and the magic had to be given by taking it from objects that had been hit with spells recently. Any spell hitting the illusions would reveal them for what they were. Rahkesh had heard that the Guild could do better, but they'd only had a little time, and any of these illusion puppets that the Guild had that were more advanced would probably be kept hidden, even from the AAA, unless absolutely necessary. The Guild didn't give up their most recent works for anyone outside themselves, except in truly dire circumstances.

"Cannon fodder." Allen's voice said in their ears. Rahkesh nodded sharply, knowing Allen could see him.

"Fire." Ally decided, "I've got two liquid flame potions." She tossed a pyramid shaped green glass bottle to Rahkesh. Rahkesh took it, nodding, knowing instinctively what she had planned.

"Now!" They both turned and hurled the two bottles, with a little magic, at the pack of aurors. A pulse of magic in mid air shattered the bottles, a wave of air form their wands spread the dark red liquid out into a thin lie and splattered it across the floor under the aurors feet.

Janice spotted the potion called her team back with a shrieking whistle and the team of ten dropped down. Rahkesh and Ally hurled spikes of fire at the aurors while Janice's team dropped back and took up new positions around the room.

WHAM - The floor exploded into flames flinging the aurors into the air. The whoosh of hot air swept back from the wall, blowing Rahkesh's hair about. Terrified screaming broke out as they hit the ground, flailing uselessly at the flames. The potion was one of Strawlime's creations; it could not be put out, at all, not until it was completely used up.

"Ceasero." Rahkesh muttered, flicking a shrivel of blue magic at one of the aurors. It sped through the air almost faster than he could see. The burning aurors were now easy targets, and Rahkesh stood to pick them off with heart stopping curses. Tiny blips of blue light that smacked over the heart and stopped it. He hated killing like this, but the raid was supposed to be done as an execution, and he had volunteered for it. The last auror fell with a dull thud.

Ally was up and running before the last auror fell, up to the top of the theater to the secret entrance. One of Janice's team joined her and the two vanished to check for anyone else. Rahkesh followed Janice's signal and stood to one side of the door with a short dark haired man, across from them on the other side of the door were another two.

"Eighteen down total. I see ten coming in with the Minister, werewolves have twenty guards. Fourteen officials have left their offices and are headed your way." Allen reported.

"Where the hell are the other teams?" Rahkesh asked.

"I've got them removing every werewolf in the cells. Oh and the three veela, can't leave them behind or the veela high council will eat us."

"This will be fun." The man standing beside Rahkesh muttered with a great deal of enthusiasm. Rahkesh figured this group would happily kill every auror in the Ministry before breakfast and call it a training exercise.

"Wait until they're all in the room, then attack." Janice ordered. "Shut the doors and don't let anyone out." Rahkesh called on the powers the yeck cap had given him and went invisible. Around him the others were fading out of visibility behind invisibility spells and concealment charms. The man beside him used a chameleon spell to take the wall's appearance. Rahkesh took three quick breaths, then one deep one which he let out slowly. The trained responses appeared at once, a complete relaxation followed by all his sensory bloodmagic coming awake full force. The shift of awareness was immediate and all his magic came alive, singing under his skin, ready to fight. It felt like transcending to a higher state of being and Rahkesh had to firmly call on both animagi to center him on the battle in the present. The shift could feel like a drug-induced high, but that would leave as soon as the fight began and he used the magics washing throughout his being. The thunderbird's roaring and screaming in his mind was carrying him away into an immense storm where nothing existed but the endless fury and destruction. Rahkesh let it, then reeled it in just short of physical manifestation. The thunderbird agreed and paused, waiting for the fight. Rahkesh settled onto the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent, body coiling like a striking snake. Around him the air grew charged briefly as the others all did the same, then all magical presence vanished as each drew their magic back into themselves and sealed it in. The Akren signal flared then vanished around him, giving Rahkesh a perfect mental image of each person's position in relation to himself.

"When the fight starts, let it free again." The man behind him said softly. Rahkesh nodded, it made sense for team fighting to be completely aware of all the others at all time. He'd never done this before with a full team. Their practice exercises had only been with two.

Now he could sense the aurors and werewolves. The witches and wizards, the enchanted silver chains…and Relora's Akren signal broadcast that vanished as she felt the flare and silence from within the room ahead. Relora knew they were there. She'd help as soon as the chains were gone. The other…a trailing bit of consciousness slipped out ahead of Relora into the room, hidden from even the most astute auror under the guise of an alpha werewolf's aura…the other werewolf was a pup of her pack, all of fourteen, and due to start Akren in a few years. The growl from around Rahkesh was almost audible. Oh the AAA was going to throw a fit about an attempt to execute a minor.

"She's Relora's niece." Allen suddenly said softly. "Tell her to get out and wait outside."

"Live ones?" Janice asked.

"Only the Minister." Which meant that the other forty three would die.

XXX

The cell block was the only cool place in the Ministry. Extra-thick stone walls and safe from the summer heat, it was usually one of the more sought-after positions this time of year. But today everyone was edgy. They had all been informed of the importance of the execution being carried out. For many aurors who had never heard of bloodmagic before, suddenly learning that there was an elite school that taught such arts and created the world's greatest fighters, and which was about to be very angry at them, was worrisome. Offending such an organization was risky. The Ministry had (rightly) thrown out the treaty with the evil-loving beasts, and their werewolf would be executed as a reminder that the Ministry was a force to be reckoned with. And the aurors were the fighters who were that force. Without the Unspeakables the aurors and the civilian guards were the only ones standing up to the creatures of darkness.

"I haven't heard from HQ in almost an hour." Jeremy complained to Nancy. The two aurors, recent graduates of auror school, were patrolling near the cell block, and not receiving any instructions for why their replacements hadn't shown up on time.

"Probably modifying the enchantments again. They can't ever settle with what we've got. I'm convinced the "improvements" are just a way to act important." Nancy muttered.

"I asked Ray about the quidditch match an hour ago. He hasn't replied." Jeremy said.

"Maybe the Minister is visiting. Can't say much then can they?" Nancy pointed out.

"He's watching the execution. Hey what if something's gone wrong?" Jeremy wondered. Nancy rolled her eyes. Jeremy was paranoid. Up ahead two more aurors appeared from down a hallway of empty cells.

""Hey Darcy, heard from HQ recently?" Nancy asked the senior auror on duty. Darcy, an older graying woman with a nose as sharp as a hawk's beak shook her head, brown eyes worried.

"No. You Kris?" Her partner shook his head and turned to the communicator clipped to his shirt collar and called HQ. There was no response.

Darcy frowned then called in the other six units on duty. No one else could get through either. The silence from the security center was disturbing. Usually they monitored everything and the on-duty aurors traded jokes and weekend plans over their communicators. The long silence felt wrong. Darcy considered the consequences of a false alarm, and then opened a channel to the other guard units. Something didn't feel right about this.

"David, bring your whole team up here, there's something up in HQ. Sam send half your team to cover for Dave."

Dave, the guard captain for the upper two floors, showed up in minutes with nine aurors. Darcy left Kris on duty and took Nancy and Jeremy with her. If it was just a magical blip then everything was fine, but it might be something more severe. In which case she'd need a full team at least.

"How many prisoners aren't in their cells?" Darcy asked Jeremy as they headed towards the auror HQ.

"Two, werewolves scheduled to be executed." Jeremy replied. "Brought in from the last raid. What- Boss?" The young auror asked as his commander broke into a run, cursing.

"That's the Akren graduate they're executing today!" Darcy snarled, "ALL UNITS REPORT TO HQ AT ONCE!" There was no response. "ALL UNITS REPORT TO HQ AT ONCE!" Darcy tried again, but the communicators were dead. "ALL UNITS…damn." There wasn't the faintest hint of magic from the communicators. Silent.

In the center Allen chuckled sadistically as he turned off all communicators in the building, and listened to Darcy's increasingly panicked attempts. They had separated off a large group, leaving only a skeleton crew to defend the cells. The other teams began moving in on the remaining aurors. They didn't want to risk the prisoners getting hurt, so they'd drawn off as many of the aurors as they could. The senior guards had reacted exactly as Rahkesh's contacts had predicted they would. The kid must have a snitch inside the auror regiments, or a former trainer.

"Silas. You're up." Allen said, "Margret, Sal, Bek, you too." The scorpion by the door clicked its pinchers in salute and scuttled under the door and out, followed by the other three.

"Aw come on boss, can't we?" One of the others begged.

"No. You'll get your turn when we leave." Allen said, much to everyone's disappointment. "heads up everyone" he spoke into the Akren communication device, "the aurors know something's up. Prepare."

Throughout the Ministry Akren students and graduates noted the positions of anyone who might be trouble, and went back to pretending to be harmless. In many cases disguised as suits of armor, cabinets, or lamps...amazing what you could do with self transfiguration and illusions.

XXX

"Here we are, let's get this over with." Minister Baines muttered to himself. To the thirteen officials with him he presented a much happier front. "This is a historic day everyone, so lets get it right. We are at last free of the dark sympathizers, lets get all the proper documentation."

"The bodies Minister?" A blond witch in bright purple official robes asked.

"We're sending them to that school of evil, Akren, as a warning to stay away from good folks and what will happen if they don't." Minister Baines said, he opened the door to the execution room and walked in, taking a seat in the front. Everything appeared to be in perfect condition and spotless. Had he been more aware he would have thought it too clean, the emergency cleaning and repair work inside had been a little too good.

Rahkesh resisted the urge to electrocute the pompous ass into sludge. Instead he focused on the others, none of whom appeared to be any real threat. They all seemed to be the type to work indoors at desks with no recent practice in combat.

By the guillotine the now-invisible illusions waited, not noticed by any of the officials or their auror guard, who had taken up positions behind them and against the walls. In some cases right next to the Akren team, but not noticing them. Rahkesh managed not to snicker as an oblivious auror stood directly beside where he knew Janice was.

The officials settled in, silenced form their chatter by the menacing device in the center of the room. Rahkesh almost laughed when he saw a very familiar reporter and her camera man setting up. Rita, just in time. He'd have to get the AAA to send her a note later. She could be invaluable.

"Let the reporter go." Allen's voice whispered in his ear. The AAA was not without its own public relations department. Rita was about to get crash course in Akren lethality. A little more training on interspecies issues and she would be most useful. Being a reporter she wouldn't even mind being used.

The door opened silently and ten more aurors entered, escorting two werewolves. Relora strode in with the confidant gait of an alpha werewolf in full control of the situation. She looked different from the last time Rahkesh had seen her. He knew she'd survived the demon attack, having been at a meeting of alphas when it happened, but the loss of most of her previous pack must have been hard, even if she was the new alpha of the London pack, or whatever remained of them. She looked like she'd aged a decade since they'd last met, but her power seemed to have only grown. She waited until she was facing the Ministry officials to release her alpha werewolf's aura, but when it washed over the room Rahkesh appreciated that the switch to leading the combined remnants of the London packs had enhanced all of her previous abilities. The aurors shifted nervously and the less experienced were beginning to sweat. Her niece, a pretty blue-eyed young woman with waist-length brown hair followed, not the least bit afraid. The aurors were much more jumpy, and kept out of reach, despite the silver chains that bound the two werewolves. Neither werewolf showed how much pain they were in form the silver, looking completely calm and confidant.

The door snapped shut behind them, Relora's eyes flickered around. The illusions became visible and began firing stunners, which knocked three people out in a second. Cries rang out and people started moving. The aurors were the best, hand-picked to guard the Minister. They reacted immediately, attacking the illusions. Their distraction and turned backs left plenty of room for the Akren team to begin their attack.

Rahkesh called the thunderbird, Janice calmly lifted a knife, and plunged it into the heart of the auror standing beside her.

"Fulguris!" Rahkesh roared as blood sprayed from the dying man's chest. From the center of his being down his arms and out his fingertips lightning leaped, rolling away from him in waves of light and power. The blast of magic-turned electricity tore the floor to pieces and shattered the rows of seats. Debris shot through the air, knocking people off their feet. Ripping into the gathered aurors, exploding their internal organs and frying their brains. The blinding light covered the room and the scream and crash of lightning brought tears to his eyes until he shut down his hearing bloodmagic. Ceiling panels dislodged under the thrashing stream of electricity and crashed onto the heads of the Ministry officials.

The Akren signals flared, and Rahkesh loosed his own. His awareness shifted. Abruptly he knew the location of every other member of the team, knew what they were doing. Knew what they saw. Knew with certainty the position of every person in the room.

The Akren team killed those standing near them first. Invisible attackers slicing throats, moving too fast to locate. Blood spurted across the room and aurors collapsed screaming. Rahkesh felt rather than saw as his comrades leapt for the scattering panicking aurors, curses leaping from their hands and knives flying. From the back of the room Ally appeared, wielding enchanted knives from which whips of deadly magic spun off like lava flying off a volcano, slicing gaping holes through all flesh they touched.

Two of Janice's team dropped their invisibility shields and attacked with a barrage of curses. These curses weren't accurate or contained and their magic flew apart into a bright glow when the hit. Under the cover the curses and blinding light Janice pulled the two chained werewolves aside from the battle. She poured two potions into the locks, melting them both to harmless slivers that fell to the floor. Blue/purple smoke filled the air from the ruined chains. The Akren teams chanted quick air cleaning charms around their heads and Ally waved the smoke into the aurors, blurring their vision.

Rahkesh hurled a shield around Rita and her camera man, beside him two of the others had the Minister of the floor, bound, then out the door, setting Relora's niece to guard him. The fourteen year old bared her teeth and took the two knives handed to her, letting loose a hair-raising growl. Minister Baines wet himself in fright.

Janice dispatched the head auror and tore into the pack of officials, spells from the now-attacking aurors bouncing off a thread-magic shield surrounding her. Beside Rahkesh the rest of the team was ripping auror's brains out through their noses with old mummification spells, the squelching mushy sounds from the bits falling to the floor would have been nauseating if he'd been paying enough attention to fully listen. Rahkesh knew everything his comrades were doing, the information coming to him from the now connected Akren signals. And knew what he needed to do.

Reaching for the floor he loosed the thunderbird's power, ripping into the floor boards and blasting al of their opponents of their feet. The flying light, spray of sparks and lashing bits of electricity wrapped the aurors and officials into a clump. Janice's orders flowed through their minds and team turned to fire.

Fire spells wrapped the flailing mass of people into a ball of flame. Ally ripped into them with her magic whips, slicing bodies apart leaving flaming limbs and bits of torsos to fall to the floor, drenching the floor in blood and flesh.

All of them were dead by the time they hit the floor. Rahkesh fell back, seeing spots. His bloodmagic wiped them out and restored his vision. The others were moving amongst the charred and dismembered mass, checking everyone. It was over. The team had picked off every single living one before they had hit the floor, taking them apart brutally. No finesse here, they were here to make a statement.

"Out." Janice ordered.

"Thunder?" Ally asked. Rahkesh nodded towards a cowering, frazzled Rita. Her clothes were charred and falling off, he'd accidentally electrocuted her. Fortunately not enough to kill. It wasn't like he had that much control of the lightning once released; it thrashed like a live wire.

"Skeeter." He said shortly, striding over to her. Rita looked up and fear. "No. We'll not kill you today." He said shortly, and gave her a few seconds to process that. "What you have witnessed today, was a…demonstration. I expect you'll report on our capabilities when angered accurately?" Rita nodded sharply. Janice appeared beside him. Rahkesh left her to talk to Rita and headed for the door.

"So. Those knives?" He asked Ally. She laughed, tossed her flying hair and called back the magics, curling them back into the razor-sharp blades then sheathing the knives on her hips.

"Nice eh?"

"Yes."

"Like whips but they can also be knives. If I throw them into someone the magic activates upon hitting and blasts right through anything, human, rock or ward. Cost a lot, but they're made by one of us. Gotta love the alumni network."

"Hm."

"Thinking of altering them for electricity Thunder?"

"Quit calling me that." Rahkesh grouched, thunder rumbled around him and he blinked in surprise then called his animagi back. "Not a word." He snapped at the smirking Ally.

"Very accurate nickname." One of the others agreed, "Thunder."

"Shit."

XXX

By the time the team of worried aurors got to the headquarters they had picked up six other guards, which was just perfect as far as the four waiting for them thought. The entire project was designed to get Relora out, and to display who they were and what they were capable of. So, aiming for a truly shocking showdown, Allen had assigned for the first fight a team of very special animagi. He liked a good horror film now and then, and here was the opportunity to create one. _Very _special animagi. Silas had already set up his camera in the hallway.

Darcy, leading her teams of aurors turned onto the corridor where the auror security center was located, only to see it completely empty, the door shut. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Nothing at all suspicious. Suspiciously normal.

Except for the tiny shiny little scorpion settled in the center of the hallway directly ahead.

"Is that scorpion?" Jeremy asked. The creature was as small than the palm of his hand. They would have missed it completely but for the light sparkling off its black and gold body.

"Diffindo." Darcy muttered, wondering what was going on. The spell shrieked from her wand tip towards the scorpion, a tiny bit of red light.

And came bouncing back as a wave of red the size of a horse. The aurors threw themselves to the ground under the oncoming monstrous spell, shields sparkled into existence.

"They're here, spread out an attack." Darcy shouted. They got back to their feet, and collectively stopped, staring.

The tiny scorpion glowed white, then exploded outwards and up. In a heartbeat it wasn't so little anymore. Now the black scorpion filled the entire hallway all the way across. Small sharp barbed spines extended from the black legs clattering over the stone floor. The twitching poisoned tail flicked around over the scorpion's head. It titled and fixed them all with beady black eyes…and pounced. Giant pinchers snapped Jeremy's head off his shoulders and hurled it into Nancy's face, the force knocking her into an unconscious heap on the floor.

"Avada Kedavra!" Darcy shouted, enraged at the death of one of her students. The bright green spell struck on upraised pincher, crackling over its surface. The scorpion paused, then shook the pincher covered in crackling green. Bits of dead exoskeleton clatter to the floor. Then the pincher glowed, and the exoskeleton re-grew, even larger than before.

"Aw shit." Someone behind Darcy muttered and the massive spiked tail curled up and struck downwards, the poisoned tip striking Darcy's chest and going all the way through her and out her back. She dropped to the floor with a wet noise as she slipped off the spike.

The scorpion attacked pinchers snapping and tail stabbing, legs crushing the aurors. It shook its body and the razor-sharp spikes and edges along its body tore gouges into the aurors nearest. The massive animal threw itself forwards, taking two aurors onto its tail and lashing outward with legs covered in tiny sharp spines. Pinchers clacked around a young witch's waist and snapped her in half. Aurors fell to the sides of the hallway in lethal seizures as the poison on the sharp leg hair/spines set in and liquefied their brains.

Seeing the oncoming death two of the aurors turned to run. From it's position above the doorway, where no one would notice it, an acromatula – Margaret – pounced. Wit two sharp cracking noises the giant spider sank one fang into the head of each fleeing auror. Puncturing their skulls and killing both, injecting poison into their brains.

Shrieking in terror the remaining aurors put up a good fight; Margaret lurched as a fire spell burned her hair, and then put the fire out by grabbing one slow hapless auror and ripping him open, pouring his blood out of his guts onto her leg. Behind her Bek – a six-meter centipede – appeared along the hallway ceiling and joined in. Flipping over he fell onto the auror team, legs pulling out their eyes and reaching inwards for the brains. Spells bounced uselessly off his plated body and the marble statue hurled at him cracked in two. Bek twisted his back half around and picked the thrower off his feet, snapping his wand and wrapping legs around him, and began to squeeze. Snapping ribs broke sharply through the fight and Bek let the auror slide to the floor, his torso crushed.

The last three aurors were Sal's, disappointingly one of them fainted as soon as the two-meter cockroach appeared. Sal promptly bit off half the head of one of the others, and ripped the last one's limbs off, then reached in and dragged out his heart. Silas killed off his last victim by disemboweling her with a pincher.

Finished the four went back to their hidden positions, Bek vanishing under an invisibility spell and Sal, like Silas, going back to the normal size for his species. The gore-splashed walls and blood coated floor were cleaned. The remains temporarily hidden in a storage closet. They would be put back on the way out, for the Ministry to deal with. And, five minutes after the fight started, the hallway was once against spotless and peaceful.

XXX

"It was in the basement under an old piece of canvas. I haven't the foggiest notion what it is do you? Sara thinks its some cult thing." The young auror asked cheerfully as he rolled out the solid gold fountain-like structure into the circular windowless room. He completely missed the hungry look on his superior's face.

"No idea. No idea at all. Most interesting." The older auror said slowly. Had the younger auror been watching he would have noticed how the other's breathing had changed and the way his eyes nearly glowed. There was a nasty look of triumph on his face and his hands were shaking. This was what the dark Lord had been searching for. And they had found it, in the cellar of one of the three Lestrang manors, raided a month earlier. He glanced sideways and noted that he had six aurors present, more than enough.

The lights snapped on fully and the gold fountain became visible. It was a perfect circle one meter in diameter. A solid gold basin, clean and gleaming. Around its sides were gold human skulls. From behind the skulls rose up twisting horribly distorted human forms that reached skyward with hands that had visibly broken fingers. Their mouths opened in wails of agony, eyes missing from empty sockets that dripped blood. The carving was exquisite, every feature perfect, but stretched in strange and horrible ways. All the palms turned outward and these made up the rim of the basin. On each palm was carved a triangle within a triangle. Gold carved into blood droplets dripped form the cut palms. Hair fell from each head and wound down the writhing tortured bodies and cradled the grinning skulls. Everything in gold.

The young auror returned, carrying the second piece. It was black, blacker than the darkest night, made form a stone that absorbed light and did not reflect it. This was cut into a circle which, when placed inside the gold basin, formed a ring around the bottom. Rising up from the black stone were black meter-tall carvings of various objects. A minotaur skull with a spiral carved into the forehead, two skeletal seven-fingered hands cupped to hold a pair of eyeballs, each with the pupil cut out. There were nine planets, each with a flower tied around it, and every constellation of the Druids was present. So were four humans, one at facing each direction, north, south, eats and west, each with a gaping hole cut in its stomach and the intestine dragged out and up to fall down and drape the inside of the black stone device. All in black, but perfectly carved.

Voldemort had a deal with the demons, and here was the next stage, so kindly delivered to them by the aurors.

From a side door eight red-robed men and women entered the room. The tallest with shaggy red hair slammed the door and stalked across the room to the altar. The head auror contained a sneer, he hated this one, and would enjoy his end.

"This had better be important!" Ronald Weasely snapped. He had better things to do than run around after aurors. The Daily Prophet had asked for an interview. It was about time he started getting some credit for his work protecting everyone. Whatever Harry had been thinking, throwing away fame? He had everyone in the streets at his will, only the best for Mr. Weasely.

"It is…good." The head auror said slowly. Inside his sleeve he opened a tiny vial and spilled the contents onto the floor beside the altar. Invisible scentless fumes filled the room. Everyone slumped to the floor, except the head auror, who had taken the antidote earlier. He smirked as Weasely's head hit the altar. This would be so much fun. Pulling up the sleeve of his robes he touched the dark mark on his arm. Now he would have his revenge on these fools. For ten years he'd waited, gritted his teeth and ignored their idiocy and their self righteous light ways. Now it was the dark's turn.

XXX

Ron's wrists hurt. His arms and back ached. He blearily opened his eyes, feeling sleepy, everything was blurred. Slowly the room swam into focus and as it did the pain in his wrists intensified until he could feel…ropes cutting into his wrists!

Ron jerked awake and cried out in shock. He was tied to a wooden post, ropes binding his wrists feet and neck so tightly he could barely breathe or move. Frantically he looked around, there were ten of them total, each tied to a post like his.

"What the HELL is going on?!" He shouted. Someone laughed and moved into his field of view.

It was the head auror, now in black and silver robes that left his arms bare, and showed off the black dark mark on his forearm. Ron's jaw dropped open.

"TRAITOR! YOU WRETCHED SON OF A PIG!" Ron screamed. The others began to wake, struggling back to the light and finding themselves helpless. Someone started whimpering and one wizard started pleading for his life.

"Please don't. Please, I'll do whatever you want. Whatever. Please don't hurt me!"

"Shut up!" Ran barked. The other wizard, shaking in terror, ignored him. "You'll never get away with this traitor!" Ron smirked at the head auror. "When the Ministry finds out you've attack me, ME! Second in command of the civilian guards-"

"They'll be happy to see you die." The head auror said, and pulled out a knife. Ron turned and gulped, finally registering that he was in fact truly helpless.

"You'll never win, never get away. They'll kill you." Ron said softly, wavering.

The head auror walked over to the altar and rubbed at a spot of dust, unconcerned. They were all fully awake now, and therefore could watch what he was going to do to each of them. It would make it better, to know what was going to happen before he did it, to watch the others suffer and die and know they would all have the same end. He'd kill Weasely last.

Slowly he walked over to the woman next to Ron. The posts had been placed far enough apart in the large room so that they could all see each other. But close enough that he could reach the altar easily.

"Do you want to know what I'm going to do to you?" He asked.

"Y-y-yes." The frightened witch whispered into the silence.

"Good. This here is a summoning device. It summons demons. But it needs human blood to work."

"N-no. No. NO!" The witch screamed as he stepped up to her with the knife. He smirked, then turned aside.

"Not yet darling, you I have different plan for, later. The blood will come from them. You'll give something else." He said, gesturing to the unconscious people lying, tied hands to feet, in a circle about the altar. These were the others, four of them. Four for blood. They didn't need to be alive when it ended; the others had to last longer. So he'd start with these.

"Enervate." The four woke, and began panicking at finding themselves unable to move. Taking in their situation they finally went silent and still. "Immobolus." Now they would stay that way. Leaning down the head auror cut each of them open, pulling out their guts and draping them up and into the altar. The horrified screams and shrieks from those tied to the posts were most pleasing. Next he summoned all the blood out of each of the found bound men and women, and dumped it into the altar. Lastly he plunged the knife into the chest and dug out the heart, tossing it in almost carelessly.

"See. Easy. For them. They're dead. You, however, will be alive a bit longer." He explained to the ten left.

"Please. Just kill me, fast. Please. Please." The witch began begging as he moved back to her.

"Don't say a thing Angie. Don't give in. He won't get away with this." Ron snapped at her.

"You're going to be the last Mr. Weasely. You'll get to watch them all. We'll see what you think when I get to you and the threat is to yourself instead of to another. You don't handle death well, except when someone else is dying. Such a pity, such a coward." The head auror said sharply. The witch began begging again, then screaming, before he'd even touched her.

He ignored her and began cutting into her forehead. The knife glowed blue, then red, and she screamed in agony as the tip carved a spiral into her skull between her eyes. The others were shouting now. Angry screams and threats. But they could do nothing. The ropes restricted their magic.

First the forehead rune. A simple start. And they were so weak, they way they each screamed. Then the ears were removed. Then the tongue. That wasn't necessary, but he tired of their curses. Next was the tip of each finger, the enchanted knife slicing through bone with ease. They screamed and writhed. But they had chosen to support the wrong side, and would pay for it.

By the time he cut open the witch's belly and pulled out her living intestines and draped them across the room and into the altar the others had all fallen silent, staring in horror. Except for the ones who were vomiting, like Weasely. So the silly boy did have a weak stomach after all.

It was not a time consuming ritual, a simply summoning really. Ears and tongue placed in a pile in the center of the basin. Intestines pulled from the body and poured into the altar, but still connected to the body and living, they had to be alive, and they had to go from the body to altar without touching the floor. It took some work to tie them to each person so that they stayed taunt.

By the time he reached Weasely, the last, the man was crying and heaving in fear. Vomit covered his robes and he was shaking and dizzy. His screams were the most satisfying as his guts were pulled loose and tossed like ropes into the altar.

The altar filled and the circle completed the head auror pulled out the final piece. The demons had required a motion from Voldemort of their agreement. And so he had provided two death eaters. Crabbe, and Nott. The two men were chained and held magically immobile.

The head auror summoned them from the closet he'd hidden them in two days earlier. Both men were alive, and fully aware, but completely helpless. Leaning the two men against the two last posts the head auror moved forward, and cut out each man's heart. His knife sinking in through their ribs with a crunching noise, cutting open a hole to their hearts. He lifted out the hearts, and tossed them into the altar.

The altar began to boil. The body parts inside catching fire and burning like dry tinder, but with a black flame.

XXX

"Allen?" Janice asked, leading her team at a run up the grey corridor. The hidden doorway swung open. Relora dragged the unconscious Minister through and up the stairs, two of the team bounding ahead of her as guards. Rahkesh waved Janice inside and went through last, sealing the door with magical superglue.

"Cell blocks have been emptied. Everyone will meet at the entrance." Allen said. "Turn left, then the third right." The team cut out their lights, running through the secret passage in darkness. The secret passage had spy holes into rooms in the Ministry and bright light from a crack in the wall would catch attention.

Rahkesh and Ally took up positions behind the group, watching their backs. Once in the main hallway they would be spotted. They had planned it that way. For now they needed to reach the others unnoticed. Signaled by Allen the others stationed throughout the Ministry began heading for the exit. They were done.

"There's something not right. I'm seeing some very strange magics here." The fae Marielle reported. Rahkesh sighed; of course nothing could ever go as planned. "Death magic, I don't recognize it, a lot of death magic. People are dying."

"What color?" Rahkesh asked.

"Black." Marielle replied. "I've never seen anything like this. It…it smells _wrong._ Dark, cruel…hungry. It's reaching out. I can sense pain, so much pain. Death…" her voice trailed off.

Rahkesh and Ally traded looks and shrugged. There wasn't much they could do without more information. But as the group took a sharp right and went down a level, then up two Rahkesh began to feel a strange sensation on the edge of his sense, like a drum beat.

XX

Two? Only two? Surely this was wrong. The head auror thought, staring at the feet of the demon he was kneeling before. The beast was dark charcoal gray with lighter spots along its wings, and dripping red blood everywhere. When they had exploded out of the altar the death eater had been amazed, but now as he watched them go through and pick parts off of the barely-alive men and women tied to the posts around the room he began to wonder. Surely two couldn't take out the whole Ministry…could they?

The second demon, red with black speckles along its head, wings, and tail, finished its meal and came back to the altar.

"Yourrrr part is done, now we will fulfill ourrrrs." It hissed at him. Its voice was deep and gravely. The head auror nodded and stood, leading them to the door. The other dropped Ronald Weasely's head back down, minus his brain, which was dripping a bit from its jaws, and followed, swishing its tail in an arc and flinging blood about. The death eater led them up into the Ministry above the research station, listening intently to the sound of their massive claws clicking on the floor and the soft rustle of their wings.

Behind the man's back the two demons traded looks. The red and brown hissed and withdrew a tiny capsule from its mouth. He slit it open with a claw and sprinkled the contents on the back of the human's head. The man didn't notice a thing. The two demons grinned, showing their fangs and teeth. That had been their task and now with the primary mission completed they could have a little fun before joining the others already here.

XXX

"I really, really don't like this. I've never seen death magic like this before. There are things here that shouldn't be." Marielle muttered.

"Living things?" Janice asked.

"Yes. Yes. Two of them, bigger than any two-legged species I know, and dark. I don't like they way they feel. They smell like blood and destruction." Marielle said. "I can't SEE them, there aren't any cameras on that level, but I can sense them. Allen…I usually can't sense anything that far away. I can't sense anything unless it's disguised and I'm looking at it. I'm sensing these."

"Silas, reach out with your mind." Rahkesh suddenly interrupted, working on a hunch he couldn't even place. Just a thought, some distant feeling that Silas might find what was happening. Silas transformed back into a vampire and sat down to work.

Rahkesh's group met up with the other teams, who were herding seventeen disheveled looking werewolves and three veela. Others were joining them now. It wouldn't be long until someone noticed them. There were sixty from Akren plus the werewolves and veela they'd freed.

"There're people ahead. At the crossing." Janice warned everyone, referring to the place where the hallways met. A collective growl went up.

"DEMONS! There are demons here!" Silas screamed warning came almost too late. They entered the massive circular room at the heart of the Ministry at the same time the head auror accompanied by two demons did.

The demons attacked, a full hundred Ministry employees were moving about and they fell like grass in front of a pair of lawnmowers. The two demons spread their wings and lashed out, ripping throats with the wing claws and sharpened scales on the edges of their wings.

"AHHHHHHH" The collective screaming hurt, Rahkesh shut down his hearing and attacked, breaking from his group and lunging for the first red and brown demon. Ally followed closely, waving Janice away towards the hallway leading out of the building.

Rahkesh's scar burned and he sent a skull crushing curse at the head auror, knowing instantly he was the death eater who had summoned them. The man died instantly, his brains flying out around him.

"Exit on the left. We're coming." Allen called through their communicators, leading the last of the Akren teams at a run towards the fight.

"Leave it to us. Get out!" Ally shouted at their comrades. They obeyed and turned away from the demons. Janice snapped out her wand and gave one sharp wave. Ministry personnel went flying, smashing into the walls. Blood spattered and bones snapped, opening a path straight through the crowd and clearing the exit way.

"Go. Now." Janice barked. The Akren team turned and ran, dragged the freed prisoners with them. Janice planted herself to one side and began lashing out at the running Ministry people, killing and flinging them head over heels. Leaving a clear path for all of her own to get out of the building.

The demon's claw went through the neck of the man beside him. Rahkesh ducked and rolled forward. Kicking up from below he knocked the demon off its feet. The massive spiked tail ripped his leg open as it fell and Rahkesh heard himself cry out. Someone went flying past, stepping on his hand. The man, an auror, fell onto the demon. One arm snapped up, claws going into the auror's chest, and the hand followed, all the way through his body.

People were falling everywhere. Tripping over their robes and crushed beneath the terrified mob. The second demon had shut three of the door and sealed them closed by melting with its flaming breathe. Turning away from the fourth door it hurled itself into the terror-stricken crowd. Wings and tail flying, fire roaring from its mouth and its claws ripping into bodies.

Ally was on the fallen demon instantly, drawing a sword she swung at its head. The demon blocked with its claws, only to find itself missing the claws. Sliced like butter by the potion and thread-magic enchanted blade. Ally crushed its breath out with her knee and put her sword through the demons neck. Two curses followed, compressing the air around the demon's skull until its head flattened.

Somewhere someone was casting spells. They were bouncing off the remaining demon harmlessly. It swung its tail impaling six and dropping the bodies to the floor as it reached out with claws, tearing holes into soft human bodies. The creature drove its horns into a woman's guts and flung her into the air with its head.

"Nice kill." Silas said to Rahkesh and Ally, finding them in the fray of panicked people. He sidestepped carelessly, letting the torn woman fall to the floor beside him. Her snapping neck was a sharp clean sound.

Allen was dueling the final demon, backed by nearly a score of others. Swords were flying everywhere and someone was spraying it with acid. As they watched it finally fell, its eyes melting out. Allen took its head off.

"Time to go." Ally muttered. "Thunder… Thunder?!"

Rahkesh was staring at the ceiling; there was an interesting pattern there. Very interesting. The drumming on the edges of his mind had reached an agonizing pounding now. Drums. Loud drums. Echoing drum rolls. He didn't hear Ally's calls, nor Silas shouting his name. There were drums everywhere. The drums hurt; every beat another death. Death, he could smell it, feel it all around. Drums rolling like thunder. The deep beats each a sharp spike of pain and grief. Rahkesh reached farther, what was he sensing? Drums. Drums in the mountains. The smell of death cloaking everything until he couldn't breathe. Gasping where the air was foul with decay and poison. Faces slack and white with death. Blood coating their hands. Children screaming, choking, dying. Rotting flesh turning black. Bodies falling into a dark pit, one, and another, and another, and another, hundred of bodies, falling to the beat of the drums. The drums in the mountains.

"The drums!" Rahkesh gasped, sitting upright.

The room was almost empty, save for the dead, the dying and those caring for them.

"Thunder? What drums?" Ally asked softly, looking around in confusion.

Rahkesh knew that smell now. Knew those awful beats. A memory he had tried hard to forget he had.

"Silas it's here." He breathed out in a whisper, mind blanking in the face of his memories of death and those haunting drums.

"What's here?" Silas asked staring in confusion into Rahkesh's wide frightened eyes.

"Death. They brought it. The demons brought it. Like they did before." Rahkesh mumbled, stumbling to his feet. He tripped over a body, Silas caught him. "They brought it. The demons brought it with them from their world."

"Brought WHAT?" Silas demanded, starting to get scared. Rahkesh spun, grabbing him by the shoulders.

"Can't you sense it? _Silas the plague_! The same one they used on the Chachapoyaro. It's HERE! _The demons brought it with them!"_ Rahkesh shouted, shaking the vampire violently. Silas's eyes went very wide.

"No."

"YES!"

"No. Not again. No." Silas said, shaking his head. Rahkesh slapped him.

"Sense it Silas! You know it!"

Silas drew a long breathe, closing his eyes. Rahkesh felt vampiric magic ripple. Then Silas eyes snapped open. The vampire slumped to the floor against the wall, hands over his face. Ally looked between them, completely lost and confused.

"What do we do?" Silas whispered softly.

"Everyone will be infected by now. Everyone who is still here, maybe some of those that have left." Rahkesh said, his thoughts coming together faster now, the edge of coming death sharpening his mind. He searched for his communicator where it had fallen in the fight, finally summoning it. "ALLEN!"

"What?" Allen asked, appearing beside him.

"We've got a problem. The demons brought a plague with them. We're all infected. Get everyone to a single location. Don't let them go home. Anyone. Including the werewolves. Get them to a safe place and don't let anyone leave or enter!"

It was a credit to Allen that he didn't ask any questions. He paused just long enough to process what he'd heard, then grabbed the communicator Rahkesh was holding and began barking orders.

Ally, looked between her two friends, neither of whom looked to be moving under his own power any time soon. Rahkesh's eyes were blurred and vacant again, Silas was trembling.

"All right. I don't know what's going on, but I think I've got the general idea. If it is a plague than Silas can't carry it or get ill so he'll have to contact anyone who needs to see us. Silas…Silas?" Ally asked. Silas didn't answer. With an annoyed huff she dragged him to his feet. Taking his face between her hands she shook his head then stared him straight in the eyes.

"Time for shock later. Silas. I need you to contact your grandmother. Now. Call Cyala, Silas, call her to us." Silas blinked twice, then nodded and closed his eyes, searching for the vampire family's link.

"Thunder…Rahkesh. Stop that. If there's a plague you've got it to. No time to sit here." Ally snapped, taking his arm and pulling him and Silas along to the exit. "We need to leave. Allen where to?"

"AAA has a safe house we can use. Safe house number eighteen. Janice, apparate there, we'll follow. Tracey is taking down the wards." Allen said quickly. Janice nodded and vanished. Ally followed her signature and nodded.

"Rahkesh, we're going with her. Silas you too." Rahkesh came out of his daze long enough to nod silently, and wrap an arm around Silas. Ally grabbed Silas other arm and they apparated.

Allen Deckard looked around at the Ministry employees. How were they going to deal with this? The last of his people finally left, leaving two dead. Of the hundred or so Ministry employees most of the survivors had left when someone had finally broken down the sealed doors. Those that had stayed or couldn't leave were infected. Maybe some had gotten out whole, but the ones here now were carrying a plague. What was he supposed to do about that?

"Marvin here." The Director's voice said from the communicator. "Allen. Allen tell me what's happening. I heard something about a plague."

"Marvin. Isolate safe house number eighteen. Let no one in or out on pain of death. No one."

"Done." Marvin said, raising the isolation wards via the thread and stone magic enchantments on his desk, not asking yet. They were old pros and knew that time spent clarifying _why _could mean lives. "Now, tell me what's happened."

-

-

How's that for a long chapter? Those of you who had questiosn about my purposes for the time travel in the prequel fic...that was just to set up events for this, like introducing the demons. Hope you're questions about that bit are being answered.

Hope no one is too squeamish about insects, I've been imagining that scene since the start of the prequel fic. Fun eh?

Ron lovers (if there are any) sorry about that, I'm sure you saw it coming...or something like that.

I did proofread this time, but given how late it is I may have missed something. I'll be fixing mistakes for a few days as I find them, but it's been a while so I thought I'd post it now.

So, has this fic finally earned its rating?

Feedback make me happy!


	8. Chapter 8

Rita – I _might _write that after I finish the series.

AiSard – actually Ron may pop back in for a moment or two

Bluezy261175 – not being squeamish is easy – watch awful scifi movies, then write gory details during my most boring class. How much exciting class would be if giant cockroaches and centipedes showed up?

Kalen Darkmoon – Voldemort didn't unleash the plague actually, the demons did, I'll clarify that, thanks.

-

For those who thought Ron's death wasn't personal enough – Rahkesh is learning soul magic. Think about it.

I would suggest that if don't remember much about the plague from the first fic go back and read some of it.

-

Chapter 8

A pair of simurgs were flying overhead, the noon sun glinting off their jeweled feathers in a dazzling rainbow displays. Every once in a while a flock of other birds would come down from the mountains or up from the valleys and have to be chased away by the screaming simurgs. It was unlikely that the demon brought disease could spread to anything other than humans, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Akren paranoia at it best. Even though Rahkesh had told them that during his previous encounter with this plague only humans had died the AAA wasn't taking any chances and had enlisted Tristan Namach's simurg friends to help. The massive birds were patrolling the skies while a herd of nightmares and herd of unicorns kept watch on the ground.

Safe house eighteen was a massive mansion buried in the forested foothills of the northern end of the Akren range. It was situated beside a small lake on a plateau two thirds of the way down the mountains where three valleys met in a trident shape. From above several small waterfalls poured out of the snow coated mountains into the lake. Below a handful deep clear brooks wound their out of the lake and down the valleys between meadows of wildflowers. A trail to the rest of the world connected the safe house to the eastern edge of Great Slave Lake. The old gray stone building, which was more a small castle than mansion, was decorated with red clay cornices, arched stain-glass windows, spires, and marble stairs and window ledges. It had been built in the early 1500s by the AAA. Originally there had been six such safe houses, one per continent (Antarctica being excluded until 1655), meant for the use of Akren alumni to conduct business meetings with each other, to hold academic conferences, and to plan the school's funding. This one was now largely a library that all alumni had access to. Books never published anywhere could be found on its shelves and almost anything one needed to know about magic one could learn here. The main purpose of this had been to allow the alumni to share knowledge and experimental works of magic without disrupting the school itself. It had also been used to store books illegal anywhere else in the world. Such as a nifty little book, written by a long dead alumnus, on using magic to see the future of the stock market.

The safe house was separated into different wings, and only the largest two of these held the books. The smaller two were living quarters and conference halls. They were also an experiment conducted by a former level ten mediwitch who had graduated Akren in 1815. Her specialties had been biological warfare and infectious diseases. After her death the containment project she had started had been continued by others. And so Akren had come to own the world's greatest example of an isolation ward.

Under a complete lockdown the windows were covered by a thick gelatinous potion infused with magic allowing no air to enter or leave, or anything else. Vats of potions in two storage rooms recycled the air, removing carbon dioxide and adding oxygen. The seal on the building was so intense that not only could no living thing escape, but the auras of the people inside couldn't either. No magical transfer of any sort. Including the souls of the dead – if anyone died they'd be released after the wards came down.

Everyone who had gone to the Ministry was now in safe house eighteen, in the main dining hall. The main dining hall had had the tables removed and extra chairs conjured. Six fireplaces lined the walls; all were flaming brightly, serving as large scale communication devices to everyone else. Here the fires were a dark forest green burning up from the bottom of the fireplace, and orange burning down from the top. The enchanted flames sterilized anything moving through the fireplace, including magic. Over a hundred people were seated in heavy redwood chairs and couches around the room, cleaning weapons and waiting while they discussed what to do.

Each person had surrounded themselves with a sphere of magic to protect them from anyone who might be sick, or from getting others sick. Potions had been brought out of storage to recycle the air for those who couldn't perform the air purification spell themselves. Most everyone was using the potions simply because the spells needed were taxing when used long term and extremely difficult.

One of the fireplaces turned yellow/green and Daray stepped out, banishing ash from his clothes. He had clearly been practicing sparring when he'd been called; he was still dressed in his dark red dueling clothing and had some dried blood on his left arm. The flames slowly peeled away from him, taking every microorganism he might have had on him with them. He went straight to Silas, who had recovered from his earlier shock and had just finished explaining to the others what had happened the last time they had encountered this plague. Rahkesh and Silas had agreed that secrecy was, for the moment, unnecessary. It wouldn't hurt them any to have everyone know some basic facts, and they weren't going to give out any details. They said nothing about the dragon Enireth, Daray becoming a demon, or any names, just facts. The others knew only they had time traveled to a place (they didn't say where or when) and encountered this plague, brought by demons. The two vampires joined Allen, Janice, Rahkesh, Ally and the other team leaders at one end of the hall where they were discussing options.

"So really all we have to do is allow Daray or Silas to drink our blood and see if we have this disease? They remember what it tastes like well enough?" Ally asked to clarify. Silas nodded. "Well I'm can't say I'm thrilled about that but I would like to know if I'm going to die." She muttered.

"We draw our own blood and give them samples. I'm not having a set of fangs in my throat." Janice suggested.

"Fine. But Silas and I have only done this for mortal humans. We don't know if any other species are susceptible or if we can identify the plague in them." Daray warned.

"We'll get through the mortal humans then." Allen said.

"We may have to wait until others fall sick to find out what sick blood tastes like. What species do we have here?" Daray asked.

"Twenty-four Werewolves, two veela, two Amadan, one cheetah fae, and one Vascari" Allen said looking around the room.

"I think we can try the werewolves, their blood chemistry is similar enough, but not the fae or veela." Daray decided.

The others dispersed to start collecting samples and the two vampires located a few table. Rahkesh and Ally joined them there to wait.

"Daray how well will your demon form handle this?" Rahkesh asked.

"As long as I stick to mortals I should be okay. At this point Aunt Tashanna's potions are keeping the demon mostly contained." Daray said. "But I won't be able to do much, even with the mortals. Despite the potions I've still got that urge to transform. And my demon form isn't doing to well. It's sick."

"Sick as in fatal?" Rahkesh asked. Daray hadn't said much about his demon form recently. He had commented that it wasn't doing well, but this sounded much more serious. The vampire had a nervous edge to him that had only appeared when he'd started talking about the demon.

"Maybe. They don't go through this transformation thing for fun. It's necessary for survival. As a vampire I just feel uncomfortable, if I transform I start feeling seriously awful. However, Namach thinks it isn't anywhere near to killing me yet." Daray said, shrugging it off. Rahkesh was about to inquire further but Allen came back with a collection of labeled containers, followed by a dozen of his team, and the four switched to another subject.

"How soon will we know what's happening back there?" Ally asked. "The Ministry was a bit of a mess and I'm sure some of them will be sick, and spreading this everywhere."

"We notified every country in the world that Voldemort summoned demons, and the demons turned on him and dropped this plague on us. We even passed off most of our raid as being an attempt to stop him, earns us points with most everyone, even those who don't like us. We claimed we warned them and they didn't listen." Allen explained.

"So now we're the heroes to every friendly nation. What about those that want us all dead?" Rahkesh asked.

"They're a little ticked off at the Brits for ignoring us…but since they banned our existence they can't say much. Who knows, maybe someone will reconsider their stance against our school? Though I doubt we'll change anyone opinions on vampires and fae." Janice said.

"Would it be possible to send in a team of vampires to kill every sick person?" Allen asked. Rahkesh winced, the people would die either way, it would be easier with the vampires, but it still sounded a bit cold.

"We'd need to train a lot of vampires, and we haven't identified any sick people yet. When we do it'll take more than one to train each vampire. By the time we can do that it'll be too late." Janice said "so, am I going to die a horrible death?"

"Not today." Daray assured her, "you have excellent blood by the way…"

"Uh huh. Doesn't matter how nice you are I'm not giving you any." Janice said. "We should probably put out all the fires here. I'll go start a communications center in the East wing."

Rahkesh was cleared eventually; it was more a formality for the records the healers were keeping than anything else. Though he was mostly mortal human he knew he couldn't get this disease, though he might be able to carry it on his body. While the last time he had encountered this plague he might have just gotten lucky – after all many of the healers didn't get it despite exposure, this time he really was immune. The dragon's blood in his veins made him part dragon and part human, and dragon and humans didn't share any known diseases. The combination, magically charged by both his animagi, gave him safety around almost any infectious disease. The Chachapoyaro healers had discovered that during their research on his blood, when they had tried to infect it with cells from the dead and had seen his blood eat the infected cells on contact.

He didn't want anyone to know what had happened to him unless they already did so he and the vampires faked testing his blood. Rahkesh didn't want to draw any attention so he added his blood to the rest of the pile of vials. The vampires had gone along with the faked test since neither vampire wanted to try actually drinking his blood. Rahkesh then stepped through the main doorway, which was burning with the same sterilizing flames as the fireplaces. Upon being cleared he went and selected a room in the north wing of the manor – infected or possibly infected people were contained in the other two wings – and opened both the trunks he carried with him.

Ally joined him a half hour later and found Rahkesh searching for the records he'd copied and brought with him from the Chachapoyaro healers on what they'd learned about the plague that had wrecked their city.

"How bad is it?" Rahkesh asked, dreading to hear the news.

"Not so bad. None of ours were near the fellow carrying the plague. Two mortals, I don't know either personally, they're not current students. They've been removed to one of the smaller rooms off the main hall." Ally shrugged when Rahkesh sighed and rubbed at his eyes, felling depressed. "I suppose they'll probably kill themselves once they start feeling the symptoms, rather than die from it. If it's anything as bad as what Daray's describing that would be what I'd do. We've got one werewolf that Silas thinks has it, he's now in a special isolation room in the west wing of the castle. But we won't really know until he dies. Silas is now finishing the humans; Daray's had all he can handle for the moment."

"I had this ridiculous hope we'd get away without losing anyone. I suppose we should be grateful it's so few." Rahkesh admitted. "This thing spreads like nothing else. I guess the werewolves are going to be a little upset. We only brought two werewolves in with us, and one of them dies. What about the werewolves who we got out of the cells?"

"They've all been checked, cleared, and had their memories permanently modified. We actually had that old Mind Mage, Vierlae, do most the work, and Cyala sent two of her vampires over to help."

"I thought Vierlae didn't work for anyone but the fae?" Rahkesh asked, the old Vascari fae was over three hundred and his Mind Magic capabilities were possibly the most extensive ever created.

"Yes, well, one of his clan was there with us and talked him into it." Ally said with a shrug. "And we cleared the werewolves first so he could be reasonably sure he wasn't going to catch the plague from them."

"And of course the vampires can't even carry it at all so they had no problem."

"You certainly brought a lot of stuff back." Ally observed. His trunks were built like Mad Eye's and had several compartments. They could store a lot but had size and magic limits because of how he shrunk them into his earrings. Rahkesh looked up from some records he'd translated into English. Paper he could store easily. Things like his broom were harder, they took up a lot of the magic the trunks were capable of holding.

"Yes, there was a lot that doesn't exist today. My bank vaults are full of stuff."

"Anything to slow or stop this?" Ally asked, sitting down and looking at a translated inventory he'd had to write up to remember it all.

"We had some success with using concentrated sap from the elimir vine. Unfortunately that is extinct today. I brought back about twenty thousand seeds – they're very small, but they can't be used until they're mature, which takes a full year. The healers were working with a potion of snagg weed roots and frisit parrot scat when we left. Those two species are also extinct. I think Daray has them in the Ateres vaults. Both options seemed to slow the progress of the plague, but only by a day or two. And they caused heart attacks in most patients – messed with the blood. There were also several cases of blood clotting in the veins when using the second potion."

"Basically nothing."

"Yeah. I've got the records translated and I'll turn them over to the healers, but I doubt it will go anywhere. This disease seems more engineered than natural. The demons must use it as a first attack weapon."

"Silas said the Inca were using it last time."

"They must have gotten it from the demons. We know they had contact with them. I suppose the demons are planning to use this, and then grab as many magical beings as they can once we start to break down and can't organize. They must not care about the muggles."

"Can muggles get this?"

"I would assume so. The Inca delivered it in the form of a sick muggle. However, he may have been magical, we didn't think to check actually. If the muggle can't get it then it makes more sense. The demons want a constant supply of magical people, the muggle born witches and wizards would be good. They kill or capture everyone alive now, the plague dies out from lack of hosts, and then all new muggleborns are easy to capture, no defenses." The more he thought the more it seemed like the demons real plan. "And don't tell anyone about the Inca, will you?"

"I won't. I'm preparing a report for my brother and the American Ministry of Magic, mind if I copy the records?"

"Go ahead." Rahkesh said, it was unlikely that anyone carrying the plague would get out of Europe, what with the travel bans already in place, but every government would want something to do. "Make several copies."

"I'll do that. Everyone's going to want one. Every government in the world is in the world had been notified and is going crazy with panic. This isn't something they're used to dealing with. Every hospital and healer in the world probably knows what's going on and is panicking. My brother sent word that a lot of the healers are playing it down, saying it can't be as bad as you say it is. They don't want to deal with reality. Denial is going to be a real problem. But these records might help with that. And Daray gave them a copy of his memories that's being duplicated for everyone. I haven't seen it but my brother said it's causing a riot. Apparently someone fainted upon seeing it and another fellow killed himself. I don't know about anyone else but the American Ministry has shut down every border – they're setting up an extra six hundred station to connect the wards to and are calling in every reserve auror they've got to control panic. I suppose everyone else is doing much the same thing. A message came in from someone named Andrew Farov just after you left. He's brining a bunch of demon bodies to the Akren laboratories. Including the ones from today."

"About time. How much do you know about that?"

"Enough. The vampire Master of Mexico sent a report to the American Ministry of Magic about the demon activity in Central America. My brother let me in on it. You're still doing experiments and stuff?"

"Well unless hell freezes over and the elves let us see their records we're going to have to work out everything about demons on our own."

"Pointy-eared sons of bitches." Ally muttered. Rahkesh laughed.

"Say that in their hearing and you'll be dead."

"Oh I know it." Ally grouched.

"We're still waiting to see if Professor Namach can get anything out of them. But we may as well start working on them while we wait."

"I'll finish copying these records and you get the bodies into the spare labs. We're going to need help so call in some of the older students to help." Ally decided. "If we assign different groups to different projects it'll go faster and we're going to need people with more experience. And everyone else will be busy with this plague."

"Okay. I'll stop off and let Daray and Silas know." Rahkesh said, glad that he'd sent all the demon remains from his house to Namach's private lab before going to the Ministry. Leaving Ally with his translations he packed the originals and his trunk and went back to the main hall, stepping back through the fire to get in.

The vampires were seated at one table going through blood samples. Daray, with his demon form, wasn't able to do a lot. Fortunately Silas seemed able to handle most of it. Rahkesh had feeling once this was done they'd have one very sick feeling vampire. Both vampires had been a mess after the last time. But then they'd been testing thousands of samples, this time it was only a bit over a hundred.

"I think we were lucky, the infected death eater was killed so fast." Silas said, "with him dead only those who touched his remains may have gotten infected. He didn't have time to go wandering around the room or breathing it out too much."

"Yes, well, I killed him in a fairly bloody manner." Rahkesh sighed, cursing himself.

"You couldn't have known. Rahkesh when you first woke you were going on about drums?" Silas asked. Daray raised his head to give Rahkesh a long look. While vampires might live a more violent lifestyle than most mortals they certainly weren't immune to extreme of suffering like what had happened during those few weeks the plague had run through the city.

"You too huh? I've been having nightmares of those drums every so often."

"I just keep remembering how every night they'd drum out the death toll, after the first week it was really driving me crazy. Day and night, even when they'd stopped it was still there." Rahkesh said, at the time he'd been so busy and exhausted. The memories had almost gotten worse with time instead of fading.

"Same here. And the crying of dying children." Daray sighed.

"I think somehow I sensed the disease, you remember how I used to do that? I think I did it subconsciously and it woke some memories, specifically those damn drums the Chachapoyaro used." Rahkesh explained.

"About that, how tired are you?" Daray asked him.

"Not so bad. My leg was torn pretty badly but there was no poison or infection."

"Could you try to sense if the fae are sick? If it's the same plague it will give off the same aura no matter what species it's infected. It hasn't had time to evolve on a species by species basis." Daray suggested. Rahkesh nodded and left the vampires to the blood samples. Their way was more accurate, as Rahkesh was occasionally wrong, but he was more likely to catch the plague in the fae.

Rahkesh knew he'd probably have better luck with the Amadan, after all he had some experience with their magic, have been hit with their infamous curse. Focusing in on one of the two present he relaxed into his chair and began shutting down most of his other senses, focusing only on the magic. Slowly his mental magical abilities set in, and like, identifying a smell, he could locate the Amadan by his magic. Rahkesh shifted his occlumency shields a bit and dropped back into his memories, using magic to strengthen his memories of what the plague felt like.

The fae didn't have any of it. Rahkesh was immediately sure. It was like smelling a fresh baked pie, and not finding any scent. He couldn't see the magic, in fact his eyes were closed, but he could feel it. A being with more experience and training would have been able to see the magic. Rahkesh couldn't do that yet, not usually, but he could sense it in other ways. Sight, sound and smell built a picture of the world around him with his normal senses. Different types of looking for magic built a similar picture. He couldn't use his eyes yet, he didn't know enough necromancy and soul magic to look through his soul, and his hearing wasn't very good – he couldn't hear variations in magic with his mind, but Rahkesh's ability to sense magic was highly tuned like a dog's nose. Not a bloodhound's, not even close, but still very sharp. The fae was clean, as was the other Amadan.

When he examined the veela Rahkesh hit a problem. Their vicious bird form was giving off too many magics he didn't recognize. And this thunderbird was snapping at them. Their bird forms ignored him, but were giving off a very strong aura. Even though it was dormant when they were in their hominid form the winged creature's magic was very strong. There were also the natural waves of seduction to get through – veela were incapable of turning those off all the way, though they could lower or raise the levels a little bit. Rahkesh studied the magic he could sense, and then gave up. There was too much he didn't recognize.

The one Vascari fae had already been cleared; that species was naturally magically immune to any disease that affected mortals. They had their own range of illnesses, but anything that sickened a mortal human couldn't infect a Vascari. That fae species was one of the most unusual looking. They had an exoskeleton that covered them like plate armor. They had dark silver armor/scales over much of the body and dark gold skin where the exoskeleton left off. They were different enough that even diseases that affected other fae species didn't touch them. The one Vascari present had left to report back to the fae elders on what was happening. Rahkesh, still wary and unforgiving of his own experience with that particular group, hoped they stayed out of it. He didn't particularly want to meet any of them, not matter how much they might want to meet him.

"How's it going?" a voice asked in his ear. Daray was standing beside him. Silas had apparently finished with the last of the mortals – they were all gone along with the other werewolves. Only the fae remained.

"The Amadan are fine. I can't tell anything about the veela. I'd say the cheetah fae is fine too, but I don't know for sure."

"He's probably good. He wasn't in the main room with the rest of us, he was at the exit." Daray said, "still he and the veela will have to stay for a while just to be sure. We can assign them each a room, so if they are sick they won't infect each other."

"Are we sending anyone home yet?"

"Everyone who's been cleared can leave." Daray told him.

"What about Silas?" Rahkesh asked, noting that the vampire wasn't in the room anymore.

"He collapsed after finishing. I got him home; the family will look after him. Cyala is a bit annoyed at him wearing himself out that much, and Nuri is being overprotective."

"Has anyone decided if school is starting on schedule?" Rahkesh asked. Daray laughed.

"Of course it is. You think they'd give us a break for that? A horribly lethal plague stop that school? Headmistress would kill you for suggesting it."

"If it's open we should get going then. The demon bodies are there, including the ones killed today. They're in some sort of secure container. We can find out if they actually had this plague or not."

"They didn't" Daray said, absolutely certain. "They wouldn't loose a plague on the world they want to enslave if it was something they could also get. And I'll bet muggles can't get it either. That Inca was magical. They probably kill people at such a rate that they need a constant source of more magical beings, those would be muggle-born magical mortals. They wouldn't dare kill the muggles off."

"I agree, but we'd best be sure."

XXX

"Well these are definitely subadults. I have to wonder about demons this young being sent after us." Daray muttered, poking at one of the carcasses. "They're young, younger than my form is. And I think they're a different subspecies too. Their wing scales aren't naturally sharp – they've been filed to an edge."

Ally had finished cutting up the claws and teeth of the new demons and gave her results.

"They've go no venom on their claws, from their fangs, or in their saliva. But they seem to have the capacity for getting some later; maybe they're just too young."

"Sure they're tails have a spike on the end, but no other spines or blades like mine. And no neck guard hairs. That's a real difference. I've got these thick hairs that become rigid and poison filled when fighting. These fellows just have scales. Oh and they're both hermaphrodites. Definitely a different subspecies. Really they've got a lot in common with the ones we killed a few days ago, same subspecies." Daray reported to Rianae, who was writing everything down.

"I don't understand Daray, you mean you aren't a hermaphrodite?" Rianae asked innocently, though her nasty smirking stopped that impression. The others stopped work to watch the confrontation with glee.

"You mean you've actually been spending that much time imaging my genitals?" Daray queried back at her. Everyone started laughing.

"I wasn't aware you had any." Rianae replied.

"Stop by later tonight darling." Daray purred, leering.

"I don't fuck reptiles." Rianae said sweetly, and ducked as a knife sank into the wall behind where her head had been. Daray growled and snapped the legs of her chair with a wandless spell. Rianae caught herself in mid air and shrugged, sitting on magic as the chair collapsed.

"That's not what Justin said yesterday" Daray snickered. He'd drugged Rianae's current boyfriend (pet) to get him talking. Justin had a reptile animagus, though he refused to say what species. Rianae had tried to blackmail him into doing something, no one knew what, and Daray had retaliated. No one knew what had actually been said. Well no one but Rahkesh. Daray's sound wards weren't what they could have been and he'd listened in when he'd stopped at Akren to make sure no one had invaded his rooms and set up traps or anything. Justin however hadn't had anything to say particularly embarrassing. And he hadn't said anything about reptiles. Rahkesh hadn't bothered to go help the hapless fae, Justin could hold his own, and there was a good chance that the potion hadn't actually worked and Justin had just played along for the fun of it. He hadn't told Rianae or Daray about that.

"Quit that. If the professors find out we've messed up their lab we're all dead." Ally complained as the two vampires rose, intent on fighting, though neither was really angry. "I like my skin attached my body thanks."

"Oh fine, ruin my fun." Rianae muttered. "I wanted a nice demon hide for my wall."

"With all the potions I'm taking do you have any idea how bad that would smell?" Daray asked. "That stuff aunt Tashanna has me drinking and bathing in seems to be affecting my skin chemistry."

"Eww." Ally said, echoing all their thoughts.

They had gotten all of their demon remains in one place, Hadrian having finally given them the ones killed at Mad Eye's house. Since the start of school had been delayed two days (despite the headmistress's sixteen-language-cursing, fire-ball flinging rage at allowing something as silly and pathetic as a demon-brought plague to mess up her schedule) they were spending their time examining the demon bodies. Most of Akren's best researchers were busy trying to get a handle on the plague the demons had brought and were busy. So Rahkesh had called in a few of the students to help work on the demons. Since most had nothing better to be doing they had readily agreed.

Matolo, a short brown haired blue eyed werewolf built like an ox who was the beta of Xayi's pack poked his head in from the other room. Rahkesh had put the two werewolf packs in different labs with different assignments. Their alphas, Xayi and Halax, fought like mad dogs. This of course got all their competitiveness aimed at getting results before the other pack. Since they were constantly trying to out do each other anyway it was a working situation. With no actual fighting.

"Not a chance these fellows brought the plague accidentally – their cells have no reaction at all to being placed against infected human tissue." He said. "We still haven't isolated the disease organism yet, but the demon cells don't die like human cells do. They don't react at all. We took some of the demon cells that had been in a container with the dead man's cells, and put them in with other human cells. No reaction. They can't carry this plague at all."

"Thanks Matolo, that's good to know." Rahkesh said gratefully. They had already known that the infection was deliberate, but it was good to know that all the demons were completely immune. There had been some concern over transporting the bodies of the two demons, since they might have the disease on them. Apparently that wasn't a concern. "Could you go tell the headmistress? I'm sure she'll want to be able to tell the Canadian Ministry they can relax." Matolo nodded and disappeared from the doorway.

Word had gotten out from a British Ministry employee that the demon bodies had been taken. Since Akren was located in Canada and the Canadian Ministry of Magic was well aware of their existence the headmistress had been receiving a lot of angry letters accusing her of brining about the very end of all life in Canada.

"Your really are rather brilliant Rahkesh." Rahkesh turned to see Haedil wandering in, shaking his head. "Two packs of werewolves in the same set of laboratory room not trying to start World War III?" The black-eyed black haired Amadan asked with a sharply quirked eyebrow.

"I explained it to them in such a way that they think they're proving the worth of their respective packs." Rahkesh said, admitting to being a bit manipulative when he'd called the werewolves and asked for their aid. That the werewolves were fully aware of what he'd been doing, and has gone along with it anyway, just showed that he'd somehow won their respect with the attempt. Rahkesh was very pleased with that, it wasn't often a second year mortal managed to get any respect out of two alpha werewolves three years his senior.

"And the vampires?"

"I made it sound like the assignment I gave them was one I'd only ever entrust to them." Rahkesh smirked. The six vampires in the third room had been very pleased with that. "And them I put the werewolves in the rooms on either side of mine and the vampires between them." The room Rahkesh and his friends were in was also the entrance to this section of labs, with three other rooms off of it."

"Nice set up. But you left out the fae." Ah, so that was why Haedil was annoyed.

"Certainly not. You get to inspect the altar." Rahkesh said cheerfully. "Well…that was the plan. Professor Namach has it actually." The ancient vampire had intercepted it and was off in his own labs.

"I suppose we'll go offer to help then." Haedil said.

"Might not be such a good idea. He's find this whole thing terribly funny for some reason, he was laughing like a hyena last time I checked." Rahkesh warned, it had been very unnerving.

"Oh…laughing like a hyena." Haedil thought that over for a few moments. "I do not think I want to interrupt then…we'll leave it to another professor actually. Yes, let them deal with the mad-hatter blood-sucker."

_Uh oh…look out!_ Sygra warned just before a dark sibilant purr appeared by the door.

"The technical term is _vampire_."

Haedil went white as a sheet as Tristan Namach stalked in, Rahkesh glanced it his vampire friends, to find them desperately trying to stifle laughter.

_I tried to warn you._ Sygra complained from her perch atop one of the shelves.

"Eh, yes, I suppose it is." Haedil said, following the ancient with his eyes, and otherwise still enough to pass for dead. Rahkesh raised an eyebrow at the vampire as he swept by, head to toe in black and gold, he must have been meeting with some other older vampires recently – he only wore anything that impressive for them.

"So the little fae is incapable of expressing himself with anything other than an uneducated low-class vocabulary?" Rahkesh bit back and laugh, he'd noted when the vampire had entered that he wasn't really angry, not even a little, and that confirmed it. Namach was amused, and toying with the fae like a cat with a mouse. Not actually angry at all. "Tell me, do you know what a mad-hatter is?" Namach asked abruptly.

"Yes, I have-" Haedil was cut off

"-A family relation?" Namach asked cheerfully. Haedil frowned. "It would explain a lot." Which asylum are they in?"

Haedil turned red, but didn't dare actually glare at the vampire. Rahkesh decided it was time to save the hapless fae.

"I'm sure you've been called worse then that." Rahkesh said gently as he finally started to chuckle.

"Goodness yes, by my own mother in fact…the language she used to use…" Namach was apparently willing to be distracted and spun off away from Haedil toward the demon bodies. Haedil shot Rahkesh a grateful look before turning to follow the ancient.

"_You_ _remember your mother?_ Sygra asked from the shelf, turning and pulling her body out to stare at the vampire in fascination. _I suppose her mummified remains are still in the family crypt? _Rahkesh managed not to laugh. Sygra had given him a two hour lecture for not taking her to the Ministry with him – that had been after she'd seen the deep wound in his leg from the demon tail. He was still limping badly and using one crutch. There had been no poison but remnants of magic. It was nothing specific enough to cause harm, but enough to slow healing.

"Did you find anything from the altar?" He asked.

"Yes. I must admit I was astonished to see that old thing again. I've seen it before you know. It was found on an isle the druids used for their ceremonies." Namach replied. "I was there when our friends the druids stole it from Rome."

"These druids, they wouldn't happen to still be around?" Rahkesh asked slowly, thinking that this was surely too great a coincidence.

"The head of the sect may still exist." Namach replied with a shrug, confirming that it had been the altar used by the missing one-eyed vampire Akanthos, Auzric, or whatever he was called himself now. "The altar, fortunately, is dead now. Melted. I was able to raise some trace residue but nothing much else. The magics have left a strong signature pattern that may be of use somehow. Nothing about this plague."

"Hey all" Dinias Ackart called, from where the vampires were working. "We've got something here."

"What are they doing?" Namach asked as the group went to see what the vampires had turned up.

"Looking for weaknesses we can exploit." Rahkesh explained.

"We've got skeletons for four types of demons here." Dinias explained. On the tables were scale models of Daray and Sharahak, along with the skeleton Namach owned and the other various pieces and bodies. "This one" he pointed to the model of Daray, not knowing anything about the vampire's other form "is the largest of all except the one adult specimen, and since it's subadult it's type may be the largest of the subspecies. Its wings are largest and it's all muscle, built for fighting. It's got plate scales on its underside for protection, but on the underside, where each back leg joins the body, the scales are very thin, and there's a…well I think it's a ligament…that runs close to the surface. It might be hard to get at, but we think cutting that would make the leg useless. The other species don't have that. In this subspecies we think it acts a bit like a spring, pulling the legs back after a leap or bound, so that its movements are faster. It's stretchy but when we stretch the legs out all the way a ligament near the hip joint contract across it, causing it to tense and pull the leg back in very quickly. If we had the actual body we could demonstrate, but we think that's how it works."

Daray was listening closely; Rahkesh could tell he'd be off as soon as possible to find a way to correct any weakness. Bloodmagic could compensate, and if his adult form had the same problem then threadmagic could be used on the scales to build strength.

"These five" Ker Telford said gestured to Sharahak, Namach's skeleton, two bodies from the attack several days earlier, and one of the heads "are the same subspecies. They've got these enlarged eardrums, probably better for hearing any other subspecies, but vulnerable. Their ears are larger and they don't twist inside like the others, a blow to the ear goes straight in. They're claws are different too. That one" she gestured to the model of Daray "has tiny barbs on its claws that are almost too small to see. This makes it rip better; none of the others have that. These five also have enlarged ridges where the claws meet the hand. That could be useful, it would be easier to slide a blade under, like you would under the cuticle of a fingernail, and rip it. Their shoulder muscles are much less robust than the others, but the wing muscles are larger. They've got more flight endurance with less strength on the ground. I wouldn't face it in the air but on the ground and good fighter could probably throw it. With this one you could also go for these scales just under the eyes, they're enlarged to deflect objects, but the ridge at the bottom makes them vulnerable. Get a knife under and rip up and they'll block its eyes."

"The other ones" Dinias said, taking up the summary again, "are both smaller species. One built for strength with very small wings – not a lot of flight ability. Immensely strong but they can't fly for any length of time. They're claws are more rounded which good for digging or carrying, but less so for battle. They're senses are a bit reduced, they can't put their tails all the way over their heads like the others, well they might but it wouldn't work very well. They've got no spines at the neck or tail or shoulders. No horns but the eye ridge scales are sharp. Not warriors, these ones. They've also hermaphrodites, but you knew that."

"The last species we have bodies for is light, agile, good wings but little strength. The magical residue in its bones is greater than that of the others except for that" he pointed to the model of Daray "the claws are smaller on all limbs, the fangs are shorter. Their brains are larger per body size than the others, their eyes are probably better. If you can hit the back of the head just right, at that fold in the scales, the skull is thin, possibly because of the brain size. A fracture wouldn't be difficult. Actually some of the bodies show signs of skull fractures in that spot. Their claws are also vulnerable; hit the side closest to the body where it meets the hand and it fractures inside, they can't retract their claws. They probably couldn't land without a great deal of pain and difficulty."

"Not a lot of weaknesses, and very species specific." Rahkesh said.

"Yes, unfortunately they seem to be a fighting culture - they've all got signs of old injuries." Marima Garron said, gesturing to the actual bodies. "We don't have enough for the other subspecies to tell anything, just brains. Probably each subspecies has a rank and a job in the society."

"Well make a quick list and a picture of each subspecies, perhaps it'll be of some use." Ally said, sounding a bit doubtful.

XXX

That evening Rahkesh and Daray headed to professor Namach's rooms. Ally had been left in charge of the lab work – they were testing acids to see what ate through demon scales fastest. Ally could keep the squabbling werewolves and vampires in line for the moment. And if not Rianae was there, no one was likely to mess with both of them.

The door was open, but the runes on it were glowing, signaling that some of the wards were active. Inside the only light was from the brilliantly flaming torches in their gold, turquoise, and obsidian brackets on the marble columns, and the enormous racks of candles on black iron twisting posts, dripping glinting jewels. The plants hanging from the tops of the marble columns were dark and the glow that usually fell from the gilded painted ceiling was gone.

Namach was sitting on the couch with Eli the magical frill-neck. The lizard's scales were dull looking and flaking off. The vampire was removing the shedding scales and carefully transferring them into a container of pure gold. He waved them both into the room and once they had stepped inside drew a knife. Cutting near his wrists then just under his jaw he called up an extensive bloodmagic set that caused golden runes to spark into existence over his entire body until his skin was invisible beneath the magic. Runes flared on the walls and Rahkesh felt a set of incredibly strong wards activate.

"Do you actually have any skin left?" Rahkesh asked. It seemed like Namach's body was covered only in bloodmagic runes, though in their dormant state they appeared to be skin.

"No. Most are unaware but if you do enough bloodmagic every bit of your skin, down to the microscopic level, can become runes. They look and feel and work like skin, but I am in fact covered in bloodmagic. The same for the walls in this room." Namach said.

"Were there traces of our missing vampire on the altar?" Daray asked.

"Yes. Distinctly his. I'll have to give another try to locating him with that. It's odd, I almost recognize that magic. It seems very familiar…but very different." Namach said, gazing blankly at the wall behind them. "I could swear I know that magic, but it's too far off any vampire I've ever met. Very strange. However it _is _old blood, been there for a while, and it's been distorted, probably by the demon magic's, from anything vampiric. I'll try to use it, but there isn't much and being so messed up I doubt I'll locate him or learn anything new. However that wasn't the most interesting thing. There were also plain traces of this plague on the altar as well."

"I thought you said there were none." Rahkesh said.

"Not _this _plague. There are traces of an old plague. Like this one, but the remnant summoning magic is many centuries older." Namach clarified. Rahkesh nodded slowly, wondering how the plague could have bee summoned through _this _altar without being known about. Then something clicked in his mind.

"About a year ago we were discussing my inability to do threadmagic. You mentioned a very ancient vampire you once met who didn't use visible threads. You said he was dead, that he'd somehow died stopping a plague." Rahkesh said. Namach stopped and looked up from Eli.

"Yes. He did. But no one knew what the plague was. Just that it was killing everything, no survivors, and nothing stopped it." Namach paused, thinking, "no one knew what really happened. No one knew because all the vampires in the area had disappeared." He shook his head, "that is interesting. Vampires, one of the demon's target species, vanishing, and there was an unstoppable plague. You may be right Rahkesh. It could be the same plague."

"And this fellow stopped it."

"He left no records." Namach said, shaking his head. "I led the recovery team in after the plague stopped. We lost more than half of Europe's magical population, which at the time was more than any other place on Earth. The demons, as far as we know, never invaded, but it does sound like they were preparing to do so. That may have been how the last of the Seven Seals was destroyed. The ancient may have destroyed it and used the destructive magic to push the demons back and stop the plague. But that is only a theory. We searched everywhere, but we were too late. We weren't about to let one so old suddenly go missing, especially if he was hurt. Mind you we might not have actually helped, probably killed him and taken his place, but we did search. No records, nothing, but the remains of a very old, very dead vampire."

"And this Auzric is still missing." Daray sounded gloomy; his demon form must be feeling awful. "Is there any new information from the elves?"

"Yes. I've already told all the other ancients, but Cyala wants you to know. The elves and the demons are currently at war." Namach's simple statement nearly sent both his students into shock.

"They are?"

"Yes. The elves, as you probably know, are not from this universe, neither are the demons. They're both here now though. I don't think you know, but when they can to Earth they duplicated the entire planet, magically. There are three Earths occupying the same space and time. One the elves inhabit, one for the demons, one for the rest of us. The demons have theirs built to resemble a cavern, except it encompasses almost the entire planet, far enough below the ground that it is actually beneath the ocean in many places. And there is no surface above it. Instead it's linked to our Earth. They've some how worked the magics so that the muggles can't find them. They're trapped there at the moment, but trying to escape.

Now the elves have also colonized several other planets and another dimension here on Earth, an endless dimension of the planet where there is nothing but Earth. The demons are trying to destroy that other dimension. I don't know the particulars. I have been to this other place, but I can't say I understand how it exists, it should be impossible, defies most of the laws of physics, and the elves of course are not about to tell. The two species are always fighting, here and everywhere, but the demons just launched a major attack. I've talked it over with the Champion of the elves – he's something like the ultimate commander of all their warriors – Ferraidar, and he's convinced that this new attack is just a diversion so the demons can get at our world."

"Great. We're facing a major demon offensive, while an entire continent falls apart." Rahkesh said, privately wondering how Namach had wound up with the commander of the elven military. "Since we're fighting the same enemy, they wouldn't be inclined to give us any more information on the demons would they?"

"Ferraidar is. The Council is not. This means that we'll know most of what they know very soon. I've never yet seen Ferraidar not get his way. The Council rules in most things, but they've never stood up to him for long on any matter, especially not a military one. However for all their history with the demons they may not know all that much about them. They probably know everything there is to know about demons physically and magically, but the elves are physically and magically incapable of entering the demon realm. They probably won't know anything about their society. The magic is too incompatible. At the same time any demon that enters that other endless dimension controlled by the elves will be dead within a week. There is a lot of land in our world that has been magically separated, by humans or any other species. Many of these areas have been forgotten or so messed up that we can't enter. The demons and elves can, and these are their usual battle ground. Our world is mostly un-owned by either species, but since the elves can survive here and the demons can't it is mostly theirs."

"Well I hope they know more than we do. All we've got are subadults and the strongest of the subspecies of those were tough enough to fight. I don't want to know what and adult of, say, Daray's subspecies, or an even higher one, could do." Rahkesh said. The new knowledge was a lot to take in, so he dropped most of it, he didn't need to know a lot of this, and focused on what was truly relevant.

"Has there been any progress on opening the altars in Mexico?" Rahkesh asked.

"Not yet. We're working on it. If we can I want you to call Sharahak through the portal. I agree that he is probably in the demon realm, and if he still lives he'll be the best possible source of information on the demons. After over a thousand years he'll know everything about them." Namach said.

"What if he's changed…joined them?" Daray asked.

"He can't refuse to tell me whatever I ask." Rahkesh said, "there's a direct blood link because he drank my blood, and a life debt."

"Exactly, even though you're not a vampire the rules apply because he drank your blood and you have enough command over the magic in your blood that you can force him to talk. There aren't many mortal humans with that kind of blood control. Sharahak will be very powerful, but I don't think it'll be enough to resist." Namach said. Eli rolled over to let Namach remove the scales from his side, and glared at Rahkesh over the vampire's knee.

"You don't look remotely threatening like that so stop it." Rahkesh told him. "Since the vampires are our only real contacts to Europe, what's happening there?"

"Chaos. There was a report in the paper the Daily Prophet from that reporter Janice spared. Very accurate, the poor woman must have been terrified. Janice also put a light mind binding spell on her so she had to write it. Then someone else wrote a report on the plague we "attempted to stop". There's a good deal of confusion, and a great deal of panic."

Rahkesh could just image Rita's dramatic style making things sound far more amazing than they really were. It would help Akren to have the publicity. He'd have to find the time to contact the reporter, unless she decided it was time to leave Europe. She was too jaded and quick to actually agree with all the anti-magical being politics, but it made for good reporting. Perhaps she would be interested in going international and reporting to other countries on how the British thought. She probably didn't respect her people much anyway.

"Has the plague spread?" Daray asked.

"How would we know yet?" Namach asked, "I brought blood samples from two of our sick people and trained thirty vampires to sense the plague. However they need blood for that and doesn't everyone in Europe distrust us? We could probably track down everyone with the plague, but that would necessitate blood samples from thousands who hate vampires. Not happening."

"Unless fear drives them to it." Rahkesh said.

"If the European governments get frightened enough they might force people to go along." Daray said, he closed his eyes and reached out to Cyala, sending her the idea. "Grandmother has a few contacts left, she'll see if it can be arranged."

Namach and Rahkesh traded a look, sharing the thought that perhaps it was time for Harry Potter to speak up. Rahkesh sent a telepathic agreement. He was immune so as long as he went through the purifying magics at the safe house upon returning it should be fine for him to go back and forth. Definitely time to contact Rita.

Rahkesh hadn't had time to contact any of his friends and had skipped his meeting with Hermione. He had one more day until school started. He'd go back and find his friends. Get them to leave – if their blood had been sampled and they'd been declared healthy then the Ministry of wherever they chose to go probably wouldn't turn them away. A great many countries were taking advantage of the people fleeing Europe to raise their own magical populations. There weren't very many people in the magical community, especially not when compared to the muggles. There was a lot of competition for those with useful skills looking for a new home. They could pick wherever they wanted. His friends might be just out of school, and graduating Hogwarts, but Hermione's marks were still enough to impress, and Neville had taken placement exams for three herbology institutes around the world. They wouldn't have a problem.

The Weasely's were already gone…and Rahkesh was going to have to tell them what had happened to Ron. One of Hadrian's vampires had gone into the battered Ministry buildings and found the altar and the bodies. He'd been looking for anyone who might have the plague, and had found and killed two janitors with it.

Ron's death didn't bother him as much as he thought it should. He was just relieved that he hadn't had to kill Ron himself. Surely his death had been awful, but he'd earned it over the last year, and he was dead. He didn't have to deal with what was happening now. Had he fully deserved it? Maybe not. But it was too late now and Rahkesh was fairly sure Ron's offensiveness had something to do with his death. Rahkesh put him out of his mind, that chapter of his life closed. Now he had to deal with survivors.

"Anything on Voldemort?"

"No." Namach said, the he smirked, a cold knife-like smirk. "I imagine he's one very upset wizard. He called demons to attack the Ministry and then to join him. Instead they spread a plague that will kill his followers as fast as anyone else, and then get themselves killed. And I don't think the other missing ones have returned to him. They're long gone. They don't seem able to open portals from their side, or are choosing not to. But Voldemort's summoning has been helping them. He thought they were on his side, they're not. We know from Hadrian's spies that he was going to take over Earth and give the demons anyone who protested. They pretended to agree to help and go along with that deal. They've turned on him once here. They've got their own agenda and don't care at all about whatever deal they had."

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Question – how long of a chapter is too long? I've decided to refuse to post anything shorter than 8,000 words; something that short doesn't deserve to be called a chapter. I can't stand reading fics with too short chapters. But what is too long? I think I'll try to average 9500-10000. Any longer and it'll take too long to write.

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Please review!


	9. Chapter 9

Apathetica – very good observation! You'll find out soon actually. Well, maybe not so soon, I've got a ways to go before I get to the demon realm.

Lurk – I guess I didn't answer that question. I'll explain that, thanks.

Lord Kenshkrix – So far there're only magical vampires, wait until you meet the others. Oh and these magical vampires so far are all the best of their species, and three of them have died so far. We'll meet some others soon, not this chapter, but soon.

Goddess of the Black Rose – very true, the venom will come in later. The phoenix tears are just healing agents, no lasting effect, the venom however…

Mike3332002 & waytoobored & swiftshadow– That's what cut&paste gets you. Thanks.

Fire and napalm – err that wasn't meant as a hint. Very interested eh? Who do you think? Should I add some stuff on that relationship?

Chapter 9

"Hermione I assure you, they're safe." Rahkesh – Harry at the moment – said to the frantic whirlwind spinning around the room. He had rearranged his appearance some for this outing. Not enough to fool anyone from Akren – given the scent of the magic he used they'd be checking instantly, but more than enough to fool anyone he would meet here. Green eyes again, messed hair, a bit shorter, slightly softer lines to his face, less muscle and fewer scars.

Hermione was in a frenzy of packing. No lists or timely working here. Her usual method of packing was very deliberate with complete check lists. At the moment her hair seemed to be getting frizzier and frizzier as she tried to remember everything.

"You're sure Harry?" She asked, spinning back to him so fast Rahkesh had to step back to avoid being hit.

"Yes. Muggles are immune." Rahkesh assured her for what had to have been the fiftieth time. It had been the only good news in some time. The demons had done their work well. If they wanted a continual supply of new slaves after they had the magical world they'd need the muggles to produce them.

"Have you-"

"I've already got Neville, Seamus, Dean, Parvati, and Cho out." Rahkesh sighed. They'd been easy – half of them had already left. Neville and his Grandmother had relocated to Canada after having their blood tested by the vampires every country had started hiring.

Tristan Namach had seen an opportunity and moved in. Taking control of the AAA connections he'd brought in and trained a total of sixty vampires. Soon after finishing with them he'd sent Hadrian the entire team, with orders to start gathering sick witches and wizards. At his orders Hadrian had trained his own team, and then had them train the vampires of every other City Master in Europe. When they were done the vampires were dispatched with blood samples around the world to train others. Forty-eight hours after the plague had been released every City Master in the world had a team of vampires trained to detect the demon's plague.

The alacrity with which the ancient vampire had mobilized what seemed like every magical vampire in the world had been amazing. He'd moved in with a military precision and taken control of everything to do with preparing for the onslaught of the plague. The organization and extreme command structure the vampires lived in was working to their advantage and the oldest of them knew well how to utilize it to get things done.

Training the European vampires first had proved a good tactical decision. With them trained and the border closed the healthy could flee. While they were being tested in their home countries vampires in the destination nations were being trained and by the time the refugees arrived there were vampires waiting to test them on the other end as well.

There had been a few protests from people not keen on having vampires drink their blood. They had been turned around and dropped right back into the middle of plague and panic filled Europe. The realization that they could not leave without being tested had ended most opposition. While things on the European side were disintegrating and the borders falling apart things everywhere else were getting stricter and tougher. When it had been realized that werewolves were susceptible to the plague (the Akren werewolf had died in two days) the pack alphas had sent their wolves to help control the borders of their native countries.

The vampires were none to keen on seeing their prey base decimated and immediately lent their support. Backed by werewolves and vampires the mortals had more then enough people to cover the borders of even the largest nations. For the larger nations, or the ones with borders in remote wilderness, centaurs, fae, and locals who lived on the brink of civilization had been called up. They'd been told their participation was essential and that only they would be able to keep their nations alive. Feeling special they'd immediately turned over anyone who tried to bribe them. Heavy layers of wards, helped along by Akren Alumni, and placed by the thousands volunteering to watch the borders, had created a system where it was impossible to get into any country that didn't already have the plague.

Unfortunately it was too late for most of the European nations. As fast as alerts had been spread by the Akren Alumni network the plague had been spread faster by British Ministry wizards frantically meeting with their associates in other countries asking for help against the invaders at their Ministry.

There had been no word on what had happened to Voldemort. Moody thought he would call his followers, train his won vampires to test their blood, and then get them all to his secret bases. What Voldemort thought about the demons he'd summoned to help him was anyone's guess. Clearly they had tricked Voldemort into thinking that they would fight for him once summoned, and perhaps they had inside the Ministry, but they had also accomplished their own agenda. The first stage of their attack on the magical world had been a partial success. Had the summoning happened on any other day their plan to wipe out most magical beings, and then enslave all new muggleborns, would have worked. A global disaster been prevented only because of Rahkesh recognizing the plague, and only because of the AAA's quick action and alert network. It was not a comforting thought. The portal array in South America was under heavy surveillance by the Ateres vampires, all of whom had now been trained to sense the plague. An attempt to finish the job through there would not get far. However, those were too obvious. A second attempt would be more likely to come form some portal they didn't know about yet.

Hermione's parents appeared at the door, glancing in at the mess. Rahkesh shrugged and gave them a small smile.

"Afternoon Harry dear." Mrs. Granger said, "Hermione have you seen any of your friends today?"

"No mom."

"Then you can't be sick can you? Calm dear, it would be good if you could leave today but do slow down."

Despite knowing that there was an incurable air-borne plague flying around the country the Grangers seemed very solid. Hermione nodded and settled down, looking through her suitcases to see if she'd missed anything.

"We can always mail it to you." Mr. Granger reminded her. "Harry, where should she go?"

"I have a few friends in the American Ministry. They've set up some free temporary lodgings over there. Once you get a certificate saying you're free of the plague you can go anywhere, but I think you should probably head there tonight." Rahkesh said. He'd contacted Ally's brother and from him found out where he should send people. "Besides the Weaselys and the Lovegoods are there at the moment."

"Oh. I'm not so sure I want to see Ron yet." Hermione said slowly. Rahkesh twitched at the name and sighed. He hadn't told her yet. She must have missed the morning paper –the names had been there.

"Hermione." She and her parents turned at his sudden change in tone. "Ron's not there. He's dead."

"Dead! Ron's…dead? How? When?" Hermione asked, sinking down to sit on her bed.

"You know this plague was brought by the demons? When they were summoned human sacrifices were needed." Rahkesh explained. Hermione went very pale and began to look sick. "The names were in the paper this morning."

"Oh, Merlin…Ron was killed to summon those things?"

"Him and several others." Rahkesh said.

"These demons…they are dead now yes?" Mr. Granger asked.

"Yes. I was at the Ministry trying to stop them. We got both the demons and the death eater. Unfortunately he'd already started spreading the plague. The demons had dumped it on him and used him to spread it everywhere in the Ministry."

"Hermione said you were training at some elite school." Mrs. Granger said, looking highly concerned.

"You've been reading the Prophet?"

"Yes of course."

"They recently outlawed the existence of students or alumni from Akren in most of Europe." Rahkesh said. Hermione and Ginny had known for some time, but they'd been careful not to say anything.

"Oh. Is that the school that teaches dark magic?" Mr. Granger suddenly sounded very anxious.

"There is no such thing as dark magic. The bloodmagic we use involves only the caster's blood, no sacrifices. It's certainly not dark. Just like vampires and werewolves aren't remotely evil." Rahkesh said gently. He was quite offended, but no need to get angry at the moment. He'd have to make sure Hermione explained this to her parents at some point.

"I think I've got it all." Hermione finally said. "Oh Crookshanks!" The cat wasn't in the room. "Crookshanks! Where did you go?"

"Accio." Rahkesh muttered. Crookshanks came flying out from under the bed, screeching like the world was ending.

"Harry."

"Cats don't come when they're called; you have to drag them out." Rahkesh replied with a shrug. "How you doing Crookshanks?"

Crookshanks growled, glared, and then hissed at him.

"Nice to see you to." Rahkesh agreed. "Shall we go?" He had brought a portkey from the American Ministry.

"Yes, yes. Mom, Dad?" Hermione's parents each hugged her, then her mother shooed them out.

Minutes later they had slipped through the one open zone in the wards and landed in the large portkey entrance hall. It was a long rectangle room where people were appearing in waves, with portkeys and luggage everywhere. Rahkesh handed the portkey to a guard in a black suit (the guard here didn't wear robes) and steered Hermione and her snarling cat over to the waiting area.

There must have been over a thousand people there. Every single one encased in their own magical bubble. It was so absurd as to seem unreal. Glowing blue and green bubbles filled the room, the people inside pale and moving around with great care, avoiding touching anyone else, lest they somehow harm the bubble and die. Children were sitting near their parents, absolutely silent.

"I don't think I've ever seen so many people be so quite." Rahkesh said dryly. "Speaking won't kill them."

"Come on, this line looks shortest." Hermione said, levitating her things into a line.

"You're going to be here a while." Rahkesh said. At the head of each line people's luggage was inspected, and the blood of every person checked. The vampires moving about were clearly making a lot of the newcomers nervous. Probably these were people who'd never seen a vampire before and had believed far too many lies for the past century. Or they had seen too many muggle horror films. "You are okay with having your blood checked?"

"Of course. I'm not some bigoted stupid fool." Hermione said sharply.

"Good. The vampires are taking down names and remembering who is. Just in case they get another shot at them under different circumstances." Rahkesh explained. Hermione winced and grimaced. The vampire's ready agreement with enslaving those they didn't like did not sit well with her. Rahkesh was not inclined to spend much effort caring at the moment. There were other things that needed doing.

"Hermione I'm going to go find the Akren representative and see what's going on. You'll be fine?"

"Yes, go on. I'll see you in a few days?"

"I'll see you at the Lovegood's this weekend, assuming I can get away from school. The teachers will be trying to make up for lost time." Rahkesh agreed. He moved through the crowd, calling his magic to surround him. People moved out of his way, pushed by a subconscious urge. Doing that with mortal humans who weren't highly magically aware was pretty easy. Other species didn't react so well.

Searching Rahkesh found the Akren signal and followed it. It was a vampire behind the check-in, scanning the crowd. He was shorter than usual for a vampire with scars on the backs of his hands and long black dreadlocks. He looked nothing like the usual vampire-image most uninformed people had, and therefore was a perfect choice for such an assignment. This vampire could both to disillusion people of what vampires really were and he could hide in plain sight. To Rahkesh however he stood out like a flamingo among pigeons. His skin had that vampire-look to it, both hard and waxy. He also wasn't breathing. This one was probably an undercover agent belonging to the Master of New York. Rahkesh let his own signal slip through briefly. The vampire's head snapped around, dark eyes alight with the tell-tale dead/alive glitter. Rahkesh let his name slip through the temporary connection, and received one in turn, Vance.

"Had any trouble?" Rahkesh asked.

"No. Not yet. However there have been fifty who were so against magical beings and the so-called "dark" magics that they weren't allowed in."

"What happens to those?"

"We're checking everyone, to be safe. Then the more intolerant get sent to stay for the moment in one of the werewolf-run refugee areas." Vance smirked coldly and Rahkesh laughed.

"Shock treatment working?"

"Hard to tell. With the children it seems easier. The youngest will be fine. Their parents might not. The children are all invited to boarding schools here, the ones with the lowest numbers of regular mortal humans. That way they'll be surrounded by other species. But I suspect a lot of the parents will be sent back if their attitudes don't change fast enough. Once we've marked their file as a person to watch they have to go through a mind-reading to see if they've changed before they're allowed in."

"Is it like that everywhere?"

"Yes. Every country in North and South America, plus most of Asia. You can't get in unless they're sure you're not going to start an anti-werewolf hate group. It may mean a death sentence, sending them back, but that's not our problem. With so many fleeing we can pick and chose who we accept. I wouldn't have thought the public would go along with it, here anyway all opinions are usually accepted, but when the Ministry added this new measure there wasn't a single protest. I guess the public is not in a forgiving mood. Especially since we tried to warn them about the demons and went there to save them even after they outlawed Akren." Vance smirked. That little lie had been let slip by Marvin Gale before they'd even reached the safe house. That old loner werewolf had a very good sense of public relations.

"Akren is very popular here?" Rahkesh asked, Vance gave him an odd look. "I was born and raised in Europe, Britain actually."

"Oh. I didn't know we had anyone from over there, not anyone mortal anyway."

"I was home taught. When I was supposed to start school there I took off for Akren instead."

"That was a very wise choice. Yes, Akren is fairly well known. Not always approved of, certainly not, we are "ridiculously and irrationally violent" but very useful and respected. We don't get involved in any scandals and we do produce the very best at just about everything. As a result we can get in everywhere."

"Everywhere?"

"This morning there was a meeting, the Ministries all agreed to the same rules regarding immigrants. We had three alumni in the room."

"I have to feel some pity for the legilimencers." Rahkesh observed, watching a veela delving into the mind of a glaring man who was tied to his chair with an immobilization spell. He looked like he wanted to murder everyone in sight.

"Yes. Having to delve into the mind of a paranoid vampire-hater must be unpleasant. Glad it isn't my job. That fellow caught sight of a few Vascari kids on a field trip from school, and started yelling about hell fiends and evil and how they should all be exterminated, "purged from the world of decent folks" I believe he said."

"The Vascari didn't kill him?" That particular fae subspecies was very war-like. As proved by their armored skin – that stuff had evolved for a reason.

"No. They're keeping the moral high ground. Tell me, how long did Nvara delay the opening of Akren?"

"Two days."

"Oh. Did anyone get pictures?" Vance asked hopefully.

"Maybe, we were all a bit busy running for cover. Headmistress called up a hail of fireballs and an earthquake when the AAA insisted." Rahkesh said. Vance started laughing.

"Wish I could have seen that."

"It was interesting." Rahkesh agreed, fingering the healing burns on his left arm.

XX

Rahkesh found himself doing what he'd been doing for almost the last six months – waiting for the Daily Prophet to tell him what new calamity had happened. It was getting old.

New students were moving about, ducking curses and playful hexes. Most of them were carrying extra limbs or tentacles courtesy of Daray and Rianae, who were thoroughly enjoying themselves. Someone was sending drooling hexes around and Ally was tying people shoelaces together wandlessly as "practice". Rahkesh was watching for the owl with the paper.

The locket he had stolen from the museum was safe and secure under the floor of Sygra's cage, the last place anyone would look. The snake was guarding it at the moment, and good luck to anyone wanting to get past his basilisk, even if she was immature.

"Thunder, this is the only time we get to toy with the new students without worrying about retaliation. Have some fun." Ally said.

"I did." Rahkesh said.

"What did you do?" Daray asked, looking around. "I don't see anyone being electrocuted."

"I don't _always _electrocute people. I spiked the orange juice. And left a potion in the milk."

"Ooh. What potion?"

"Hair growth potion. Daray how is Silas?"

"He's recovering. He got back last night. Most of the school knows what he was doing so I figure they'll let him alone. Even the vampire who're looking for a fight with him won't right now – they wouldn't want blood that's that magically exhausted." Daray said. "Ah…I think that fellow is finally feeling the effects of your potion."

The fae Daray was pointing to had started growing a huge mass of red hair, the wavy stuff falling first to his shoulder, then to his waist, then to his feet.

"Um, that's a lion fae." Ally said.

"That could be bad. Where's the rest of his pride?" Daray asked.

"That would be us." A silky purr behind them made the group turn to look.

Three tall, thin, red-haired, gold-skinned females were approaching. Their eyes slitted like a cat's and their skin a dusky gold. Their short hair was a golden red and was not so much hair as thick fur over their heads. All three were dressed in red leather.

"Don't you dare toss that tentacle growing hex." The one on the left, who was a bit taller than the others, growled.

"I would never dream of harming such enchanting beauty." Daray replied smoothly, and hurled the hex at an unfortunate young vampire. "Do the three of you model?"

The lioness in the center purred, eyes glinting. Ally and Rahkesh traded amused looks. Daray would of course go after three of the most _un_-available females in the school. So predictable.

"I think at this point we're supposed to attack you for that." The lioness on the right told Rahkesh, gesturing to the poor lion, whose hair was nearly eight feet long. Rahkesh caught the very real threat and called up his lightning, letting it ripple over him briefly and crackle into existence at is fingertips.

"Nice." The lioness said appreciatively, and then sniffed the air. "Oh my. What animagus do you have?"

"You don't need to know that." Rahkesh said.

"Mysterious." She replied. With two steps she crossed the space between them and sat down on the chair next to him, crossing her legs perfectly and purring at him. "I'm Esi. These are Adila and Chenzira."

"Rahkesh." He replied, starting to get a very bad feeling about this. Lion fae were, as Moody had noted, very territorial about the females of their species.

"A very good name." Esi said, flicking a finger around a strand of his hair.

"And very handsome for a mortal." Adila, the one in the middle, purred, leaning in from Rahkesh's other side.

Chenzira had been watching the other two, now she caught Rahkesh's eye and purred, then licked her lips and purred again. She looked up past him, and gave a soft growl.

Esi and Adila moved away from Rahkesh at once and three turned to look over at their lion, who was finally managing to get rid of the hair.

"Looks like Fengyang has sorted himself out, poor kitty." Chenzira said pityingly. The three females stalked off in his direction and we soon standing around him purring.

"Thunder, you are going to be so dead when that lion finds out about this." Rianae said, laughing.

"What? Because those three a bit sluttish? Not my fault they started climbing all over me." Rahkesh protested. "You'd think I had catnip on me."

"I doubt he's going to see it that way." Daray said. "However, next time you could always send them my way. And perhaps that catnip thought has merit…"

"I'll do that." Rahkesh agreed, no way was he getting involved with _anyone _from Akren. Drop-dead-gorgeous or not. Way too dangerous.

"You can't say you're not interested." Silas said, appearing beside Daray from somewhere.

"No. But I stay away form Akren students as a rule. It's a survival thing. I'm enjoying being alive." Rahkesh said. If he got killed by his fellow students it wasn't going to be because he was spending too much time with a lion fae's lionesses. There were plenty of perfectly acceptable females _outside _Akren. Preferably muggles – they were even safer. Magic folk were generally a risk. And there was no shortage of muggles in the towns and cities accessible from Akren. He could find someone every night of the week if he wished. A lot of Akren students did.

"I noticed we're missing a few staff members." Silas said, sitting beside Rahkesh.

"Yes. I would have thought Masamba would be here, just because the new lion fae are." Rianae said. The tiger fae was a professor of Mind Magic, and he was a Shirashi Tiger, a magical subspecies of Siberian tigers that were some of the largest felines in the world. tiger fae and lion fae were civil, but competitive, in the way predators were with each other. The lion fae would be at pains to avoid offending him. It was odd indeed to not see him around.

The newest students had had their traditional obstacle-course arrival test messed up by the plague scare. As a result the normal feast hadn't happened. And apparently some of the staff hadn't deigned to show up that morning.

The new students had finally gotten to the school the night before, coming in two waves with the faster groups arriving around noon and the last battered trio arriving near midnight. Today was their first meeting with the other students and the traditional evening meal shared with their fellow newcomers had been left out of the schedule completely. Most of the new students had healed whatever injuries they had incurred, but one werewolf had managed to get a porcupine needle driven into and underneath his kneecap, and was still on crutches. One of the new veela was also on crutches, having gotten stepped on by an angry Yeck.

Their injuries and messed up incoming schedule didn't mean anyone was giving them a break. And the spells flying at them seemed a bit more destructive than what Rahkesh had experienced. For some reason he didn't quite understand the student body as a whole had stepped up their aggressiveness and competitive urges. The new students were safe when they'd gotten their food and found seats, only then getting a break form the older students.

"Yes I noticed a few were out. I heard Strawlime has called up every potions master he knows and some healers to examine this plague. You know they still haven't found the agent. They don't even know if it is a bacteria or a virus." Ally said.

"Or something else. This is the demons. They're not even from this universe, originally." Rahkesh said.

"That's great. A space plague from the twilight zone." Ally said cheerfully. "Never mind, muggle thing." She sighed at the confused looks.

"Hm. And Xanthius is bouncing back and forth from the elf realm to this one like a yoyo on a bungee cord. With a few of the other ones in tow. Last I checked Namach was cursing at the one called Ryavar while they debated what to do with the portals in Mexico." Daray said.

"Was he really?" Rahkesh asked, "did you record any of it?"

"No. I was there because they caught on to my demon form's attempted transformation."

"Uh oh."

"Not as bad as we thought. Now that the demons are going after everyone they won't kill me. I'm far too useful as a potential spy." Daray said grinning.

"As a spy?" Rahkesh hadn't considered that. Daray was probably the only creature aside from Sharahak who had much chance of getting into the demon realm.

"Yep. Grandmother wants to branch out. She's decided to get the family to work removing slaves from the demon realm. They've got possibly millions of them, according to the elves." Daray said.

"And grab anything shiny that isn't nailed down." Rahkesh chuckled.

"Even if it is. Though that doesn't matter much – it's not like our family _isn't_ the wealthiest of all vampires." Daray said, "aside perhaps from Namach, but no one knows enough about him to tell."

"The demons have millions of slaves?" Ally asked.

"Possibly, there are many thousands at a minimum. They've probably been running a breeding program down there. We put the idea to the EWSC." Daray said.

"Who?"

"End World Slavery Council," Daray explained, "they were the ones who stopped human slavery in magical communities. They've been working on the muggles now, but they haven't had much luck. So they were delighted to help anyone we can drag away from the demon realm."

Rahkesh didn't bother to ponder on the complete absurdity of the world's largest anti-slavery movement working _with _vampires. It was one of those oddities that just happened from time to time in the magical world.

"As soon as they find a way to open the portals without summoning I'll contact Sharahak. If he's there he can probably help get you in once you finish training and the transformation." Rahkesh said.

"Assuming he hasn't joined them." Ally said.

"He hasn't." Daray, Silas and Rahkesh all replied. Sharahak was way too nice and mentally stable.

"I can tell you, Namach really wants to meet him. An old vampire he doesn't know." Daray said.

"How old was Sharahak when we met him? I never got a straight answer." Rahkesh asked. Sharahak had avoided his questions and given estimates of anywhere from five hundred to nine hundred.

"No idea."

"I'd be a bit worried Namach or Cyala would consider him competition if he turns out to be anywhere as powerful as they are." Rianae warned.

"Neither of them recognized him from our memories, and he didn't have much starting power so even if he is well over a thousand or even over two thousand he wouldn't present a threat, not to them anyway, though he might make a lot of City Masters very nervous. A new old vampire on the scene who is actually a demon…I can see how that would frighten a lot of the City Masters. But since he's a demon he won't ever rule over any of the vampires…but he is still part vampire so he may still keep many of our customs. Unless he's gone entirely demon since we last saw him, it has been along time. But I really can't see him getting into any fights with any of the real ancients. Can you really see Sharahak going up against either of them?"

"He'd get eaten alive. But it's been a long time." Rahkesh said.

"Maybe. I'm not worried over that." Daray said.

And owl dropped the Daily Prophet onto his head from above. Rahkesh caught it out of the air and watched the owl take off, not keen on staying around where there were eagles and bats and winged cats flying in and out delivering mail.

"How bad is it?" Daray asked way too cheerfully. Rahkesh glanced through the headlines, every single one dealt with the plague.

**Death Toll Rises to Eight hundred in Britain. **

**Germany Closes all Office Places and Schools in Effort to End Plague**

**Austria Hospital Stops Accepting Patients "There's Nothing we can do."**

**Is this the end of Europe? **

**Two Thousand Dead in Poland**

"Bad. I wasn't aware there _were _two thousand magical people in Poland." Rahkesh said, flipping to the articles on his home country. "Interesting, Spain hasn't had a single case. Oh but they're on our side anyway, none of the other Ministries would have sent a messenger to them, therefore no one got infected. Here listen to this."

Last night the healers of Saint Mungo's contacted new Minister of Magic Roland Trevok to inform him that eight hundred people had died from the continuing plague. Healers did everything they could but were unable to cure a single case. Saint Mungo's is now requesting that people stop coming to them when they fall sick – there is no cure.

"If you are going to die it may as well be at home with people you love. We have no cures and every known magic is ineffective." A healer who will remain anonymous said today. "We will continue to try but we don't have room for more patients, and there is nothing we can do for them."

In the three days since its arrival, thrown into our world from the demon realm, this unstoppable plague has killed nearly ten thousand and shows no signs of slowing down. Europe (excepting Spain) is under a forced quarantine and anyone wishing to leave must have their blood tested for the plague by vampires.

Many people fleeing Britain oppose having their blood tested by vampires, saying that "some other way must be found", unfortunately there is not as yet any other way for accurately testing for this lethal disease. Those wishing to flee must give a blood sample, which is then given to a vampire to be tested. Even then they may still be denied entrance into any other nation. Many other nations have very relaxed ideas about dark magic and the evil of vampires and werewolves and will not permit anyone to enter who is against their ideas.

"It's not right." Says one anonymous wizard, fleeing with his wife and three children, "they shouldn't be able to turn us away because we have different ideals." The nation of Canada today issued a statement saying that all incoming refugees will have their minds read, and anyone posing a possible threat to citizens of Canada, like werewolves, will not be permitted entry.

"Clearly they're being controlled by the dark creatures." Said one witch who was forced to return. "Only evil beings like werewolves would do this, sending us back here to die. No human would. I think we need to help them realize they have to free themselves of these dark monsters."

"Gee, and you wonder why you weren't allowed in." Ally muttered. "My brother says it's really very comical. First they shriek and scream about giving blood to a vampire, after they're done freaking out when they see their first vampire anyway, apparently vampires look too much like mortals and they're offended. Listening to these refugees rant and rave about not sending their children to school with monsters or living in the same neighborhoods with them, and then making a fuss when they're thrown out. They say it's cruel and vile and they shouldn't be punished by a government controlled by monsters. That they ought to be able to live as they please. Some even go so far as to say that they're from Europe which, apparently unknown to everyone else, is the birthplace of magic, which it isn't, and therefore they're automatically right about everything. The Asian nations are getting very offended. My brother and his team are having a lot of fun tossing them back to Europe."

"What about their children?" Rianae asked. "There aren't enough magical humans to be killing them just because their parents can't be allowed out of Europe." She didn't have to say that if there was a demon invasion they would need everyone they could get. By this point all of their little group was fully informed on what was happening, and most everyone else knew that the demons were preparing some sort of attack. Leaving the children with their parents, who obviously couldn't protect them, would be a death sentence from the plague, or end with them enslaved by the demons.

"They're taking the children in. Actually in some cases they're forcing refugees who are sent back to leave their children behind." Rahkesh said, flipping the page. "They put the parents in a situation where they let loose and attack a werewolf, then charge them with hate crimes. The children are brought in and the parents sent back. Of course they're only doing this with the youngest. Apparently there's no shortage of people willing to adopt them."

"I wouldn't think there would be. Magical people hate having non-magic children, better to adopt. And the kids really need the help." Ally said.

"What happened to the Minister of Magic we abducted anyway?" Silas asked. Rahkesh had to stop and think, he hadn't even considered it at the time.

"You cleared him; his blood sample was with the rest. I assume he's in a cell at Carrion." Daray said.

Carrion was the Akren-owned prison. Usually it had no inmates at all, except for Strawlime's latest bunch of serial rapists he wanted to test potions on. Namach had installed death wards a few centuries earlier and Xanthius had had a good time building soul curses into the wards. If you escaped your soul was cursed and you died horribly. There were lock son the cells but they were easy to break – it wasn't like anyone in their right mind would leave. The other aspect of the death wards was that they attached themselves to your magic. Then a single thought from Namach or the headmistress would kill you instantly. No matter how far you ran, the spells would stick.

"Probably Carrion, though he may be in the school dungeons." Ally said. "Funny, they didn't ask for him back." There had been silence from the British Ministry over the attack.

"Have they got a total death count?" Daray asked.

"Well we've got twenty-nine countries that have banned the existence of vampires and werewolves. Oddly enough the magical communities of those nations have become awfully tight ever since, despite that the non-magical populations are actually at war in some cases." Ally reminded him.

"Well no one really cares if the non-magical community decides to go to war. Especially since the wars in question are mostly religiously motivated, or are about things that don't matter to us. It only affects incoming muggleborn people. And you can note that all those countries are the ones with the strongest boundaries between magical and nonmagical communities. The places that accept everyone have a very laid-back system. Heck in Australia half their government is aware of the existence of the magical community, and they just enchant them so they can't say anything to the public." Daray said.

"Right, but since they've banded together they've stopped interacting with everyone else and become awfully isolationist." Ally said.

"Here we go, death total by country." Rahkesh said, finding the right page with a table of the countries afflicted in the special extra-long edition of the Prophet. "Only nations in that anti-magical being agreement have this plague. Wow. It's been three days."

"Remember how fast it spread before. And these people don't have the Chachapoyaro's system to work with. They could just order all sick people to the hospital and kill anyone who refused, these people don't do that. Plus if it was spread by people traveling as messengers between Ministries you've got indoor air circulation systems spreading this stuff." Daray said.

United Kingdom - 800Sweden - 319

France- 764Lithuania- 94

Belgium- 289Latvia- 22

Netherlands- 271Estonia- 31

Switzerland- 320Belarus- 49

Germany- 1109Algeria- 178

Denmark- 218Morocco- 305

Austria- 212Syria- 514

Hungary- 260Turkey- 412

Czech Republic- unknownLebanon- 90

Slovakia- 146Iran- 219

Slovenia- 123Iraq- 144

Poland- 2000Kazakhstan-unkown

Kyrgyzstan- 77

North Korea- unknown

"Looks like their nasty little alliance has lost over eight thousand people in three days." Rahkesh said, not entirely without relish. "Must be a lot of frightened people over there."

"Interesting, Norway was in the original group wasn't it?" Daray asked.

"Left yesterday." Ally said, tossing over her morning paper, she got the American and Canadian ones. "Some sort of revolt against the Ministry. Half the former Ministry is imprisoned. They had laws from the Dark Ages saying that certain pureblood families got seats in government. Not anymore. They're going to turn over their former Minister to the City Master of Oslo. Too make a point about interspecies cooperation."

"City Master of Oslo…that's Sahvina, she's gotta be very happy right now." Daray said. He had memorized the names of every City Master in the world, and never lost a chance to show off the knowledge. The older vampires approved, and therefore it was a good survival strategy. Rahkesh secretly suspected that Daray did not actually care at all, being an Ateres.

"Ha, progress." Silas said. "Finally."

"Not enough." Rianae said.

XX

"Before we begin anything else I'm going to tell you that not one of you is going to be doing any necromancy until I say so. Got that?" Namach growled at the class of seventeen. Everyone nodded. "Good. Next thing, each of you will need to construct at least two very personalized knives for this magic. Some of the rituals you'll be doing will need a knife that will self destruct during the ritual and never be used again. These two knives will probably take some time to make, and they'll be used once each. Unless you happen to make a really good knife that somehow withstands the ritual and can be used again. I see that once a decade or so. Two centuries ago I had a class where five students managed it. We had unusually powerful unicorn blood that year, don't expect it again."

Rahkesh, seated next to Daray, was immediately glad that he had transported all of the magical items he had collected form his cottage in Britain to his rooms at Akren. Initially he'd removed them hoping to keep them safe and make and wand/staff. When he'd read the course description for this class he'd grabbed all of them before meeting Hermione. Ordinarily getting that sort of stuff past customs would take weeks, but his documentation of being a rare potions ingredients supplier helped. As did being one of Akren's – those who were currently enrolled or graduates of the renowned school of magic had near complete freedom for transporting stuff. Not so much because everyone trusted them, but because no one wanted the trouble it would take to change things. Rahkesh had told the vampire guard Vance that he'd met at the American Immigration port what class the stuff was for, Vance had only had to mention the words Necromancy and Bloodmagic, and no one on the American or Canadian side had asked to see anything.

This was the smallest class he'd had yet at Akren. As students progressed through the bloodmagic classes more and more dropped out or died. This class was also unnecessary for earning a Mastery in Bloodmagic. It was the intro level course for Necromancy however. In order to become a Master of Bloodmagic you had to complete several required rituals and a certain number of other rituals of various levels. You couldn't just do level one rituals. There had to be at least one that progressed to the seventh stage. There was also a written exam.

Akren set the standards for Masters of Bloodmagic, Necromancy, Soul Magic, Thread Magic, and Stone Magic. The tests were conducted on land belonging to the school but usable by anyone who wished to try the tests, Akren graduate or not. Becoming a Master in things like Mind Magic and Feather magic were tests determined by several highly selective schools. Other things like potions were determined by the Guilds of Magic such as the World Potion Masters Guild. Anyone caught passing themselves off as a Master Bloodmagician (or Blood Mage) who didn't have the paperwork to prove that they were, and weren't on record, was subject to punishments set down by the very unforgiving Guild of Bloodmagic.

Rahkesh intended to finish preparing for his tests in bloodmagic on his own time. Students were required to take the classes, but doing everything necessary to pass all the requirements was up to them. They worked on that individually with help from the professors. At that point the magic got so personalized that there was little point in having a class.

Rahkesh's body still ached from his latest ritual, preformed the night after the plague had been brought into the world. It had been a balance enhancing ritual, the first level of a six stage set. He'd also completed another stage in his ongoing stamina set that morning. He'd pushed the two rituals too close together and was feeling the effects. Nothing had gone wrong but his body was struggling to assimilate both at once. The places where he'd had to put runes for both rituals – layering the cuts – had a deep ache to them. Because many rituals used the same place son the body the skin there tended to alter itself, becoming composed entirely of bloodmagic runes layered and working like skin. Rahkesh's wrists, temples, shoulder blades, sternum, and the tops of his feet were starting to show signs of heading that way, though he hadn't performed nearly enough rituals to have that fully happen yet.

Rahkesh was going to give it a few weeks, then ask permission for the second stage of the blood purifying/poison removal set. Doing that required supervision from a professor to document that what you did actually worked. Normally students were told to wait for nearly six months between the first stage and the second one, but if they completed a focusing ritual and magic directing ritual then there was no real reason to deny them trying. Rahkesh was planning his focusing ritual for ten days ahead, then the magic directing ritual fourteen days after that. With both of those to give him the ability to perform the second stage of the poison removal set he felt sure Namach would allow it.

Sometimes in order to complete one bloodmagic ritual you had to complete another that would give you the ability to do the one you wanted. Rahkesh was caught doing that right now. He was building up an impressive list of first and second stage rituals that would give him a sound base to work from for other things. Most of them were things he would have done anyway – the focusing one allowed the user to manipulate the way their mind focused on magic and was necessary for some of the advanced Mind Magics. Not required, but it helped make things easier. The magic directing ritual was part of an eighteen stage set that Rahkesh was hoping to one day complete all of. They allowed for fine manipulation of magic for greater precision and control that was an absolute necessity when forming large-scale warding. It would also greatly improve his normal spell casting and most people's wandless abilities sky rocketed after doing the magic directing rituals.

"Ian and Richard if either of you throws another dart in my classroom I'll lobotomize you with it." Namach growled suddenly. The vampire and werewolf jumped, then went red and ducked down in their seats, the darts disappearing. Vampires and werewolves absolutely despised each other and rarely missed a chance to torment each other. Ian muttered something about vampire honor.

"Brat. You haven't proved you have any and therefore have nothing to lose." Namach snapped, silver eyes flashing dangerously. Ian jumped and the other vampires glared at him. Namach waited a few moments to see if he had any more comments, before returning to his lecture.

"Like bloodmagic there are two types of necromancy. Can anyone tell me what they're known as?"

"Black Necromancy and White Necromancy." Daray answered

"Good. I will ask you what the difference is on every essay and test in this class so you'd better learn it now."

"Isn't there a third type?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes. The Grey Necromancer, you can count on one hand the number of them in the world right now, I'm one of them." Namach said. "A grey necromancer is capable of all magic of both the white and black necromancer. It is an almost impossible feat and I don't expect any of you to manage it for a few hundred years, if any of you are left, we'll see then.

The titles of White Necromancer and Black Necromancer date back to the last days of the Egyptian pharaohs. A White Necromancer uses human and animal sacrifices to perform necromantic magic. They rely on other's pain, blood and death for their work. A Black Necromancer is the opposite. They use only themselves. They use their own blood, their own pain, their own life. Most people today equate White with kindness and good, and Black with evil. As with bloodmagic, in necromancy it is the opposite.

Aside from how they operate there are other differences between these two types of necromancy. Black Necromancy takes longer to learn, longer to perform rituals, and rituals are limited by the necromancer's physical and magical capability to withstand the magic they want to use. White Necromancy is easier to learn, has faster rituals, and rituals are limited mostly by how much killing and torturing you can handle.

From that it might sound like White Necromancy is the stronger sort. It is in fact weaker. White Necromancy doesn't last very long and it can be broken or disrupted easily. It is easier to lose control over the magic, and the extent of what it can fully do is less. There is also a risk that if you kill too many in too short a time span the souls will gather and try for revenge next time you attempt necromantic magic. Black Necromancy can do much more, reach further, and is more secure. The overall power of a Black Necromancer is also greater than a Whit, usually. In this class you will learn a little of both and be able to find which is right for you. If either, just because you got this far doesn't mean you'll ever manage any necromantic magic. Now I'm going to ask you that at least six times this class, everyone got it?"

The class all nodded. Some of them had enchanted their pens to copy down the entire lecture while they listened, Rahkesh preferred to write everything himself. As he finished he began to wonder about having to perform White Necromancy, he would have to find people to torture and kill. He wasn't too keen on that idea. Though there were plenty of death eaters still out there…if they survived the plague.

"Now that you know what the two types of necromancy do and how they're done, why are they called Black and White?" Namach asked.

"Black is the color of order. It is the absence, therefore it is calm, objective, and pulls only on itself. White it the combination of all. It is turmoil, chaos, but because it has all it can be swayed and is therefore unobjective, and can be twisted away from its purpose. White and Black in Necromancy are classified by the way_ light_ works, because to die you pass through an absence of light. Constant opposites." Rahkesh answered.

"Exactly. Memorize that as well." Namach said to the class.

XX

Rahkesh charmed the lid off of the box sitting on his desk. Inside sitting on a black cloth was a Basilisk fang. Moody had retrieved it for him from the Chamber of Secrets, taking Rahkesh's friend Xasseri to open it for him. The sly old snake had been very keen to see the Chamber. He'd been very disappointed with it, complaining about Slytherin's bad taste. Xasseri was getting old and preferred a nice sunny rock or cozy pillow in front of a fire place to a cold damp cavern.

The fang was to be the core of the knife Rahkesh was making. It was hollow and Rahkesh had a small thunderbird feather plucked from his head, directly over where his scar was, to insert into it.

There were several fangs in the box, but the one he selected was a small thin one. It was the whitest of all of them, and the sharpest. Rahkesh measured it then the feathers he had, picking out a perfectly formed gold and black one.

Thunderbird feathers were hard to get – the birds didn't often go into corporeal form. When he was throwing up a storm he wasn't actually solid. He'd had to practice for some time to get his form to become solid. At that point he'd been shocked to discover that his feathers were filled with lightning, giving off bolts everywhere. Now the black and gold feather scattered sparks and made his fingers tingle. Rahkesh concentrated and the sparks stopped, now the magic was inside, visible rippling waves of lightning in the feather. As Rahkesh stared at it he slowly felt as if he were being drawn in, as if the feather had expanded to fill his vision and the rippling lightning morphed into a massive storm. A view of an entire storm large enough to cover a country fixed inside the feather.

Rahkesh blinked twice and barely managed to stop himself from transforming. The rumble outside told him that he had only just managed it. There would be a storm that night. He only hoped no one had noticed that one of the rumbles had been centered on his balcony.

"Everything okay?" Daray asked, prowling into the room silently.

"Yes. Examining knife making pieces."

"Ah. I'm using demon and dark angle parts mostly. Plus Satan's contribution." Daray said. On his shoulder Satan chirped.

"Only birds are supposed to chirp." Rahkesh told the bat. Satan snarled and showed off his fangs.

_Sssss. Those don't even qualify as fangs little one._ Sygra hissed. She partially uncoiled from Rahkesh's neck, hood flaring. Satan snarled again and Sygra struck with lightning speed, snapping her fangs through a wing.

Satan's pained scream shot through the air as the bat thrashed. Sygra released him and wrapped herself around Rahkesh again. Satan shrieked painfully and settled, licking at his punctured wing.

Daray and Rahkesh watched the little fight with amusement. Daray flicked a healing spell at the bat and shrugged at Rahkesh.

"If he doesn't want to get hurt he should have transformed." Daray said. Satan whined. Rahkesh didn't point out that if _his _familiar had transformed she could have swallowed Satan whole. He didn't know how large Satan could get, but probably not large enough to face down Sygra.

"The goblins?" Rahkesh asked. Daray had been spying on the goblin students meeting after their classes.

"Shut down banks in certain dark-age-type European countries today."

"What was the delay for?" The original plan had been for he goblins to shut down the banks the day of the raid on the Ministry.

"Dragon nesting under the Diagon Alley branch."

"What?"

"Dragon went and laid eggs. Well, not really a dragon, the fire lizard subspecies. It was an emperor fire lizard so obviously they had quite a time getting it out before they shut down."

The emperor fire lizard was a subspecies of dragon that lived underground, primarily in volcanoes, which could get a hundred meters long. The lizards normally had a deal with the goblins, but a mother fire lizard was one very dangerous reptile.

"There'll be a late edition of the Prophet announcing it." Daray added. "I should think the panic will be amazing."

"That's what happens when you entrust your money to another species then discriminate against that species to the point of basically locking them in the bank and not allowing them to leave." Rahkesh said unsympathetically. The way the witches and wizards of his home country had treated the goblins lately was despicable. They'd decided that the goblins were not allowed to leave their banks and underground homes, and that aurors had a right to inspect those homes unannounced without needing any cause or warrant. The sheer stupidity of doing that, and not removing their money first, ended any pity Rahkesh would have had. The fools had set themselves up for it.

XX

"You can have your pick form these cells." Ambrosius told Rahkesh. One of Lord Hadrian's best Ambrosius was watching over the cells of the muggle vampires Hadrian had decided to execute. Ambrosius was a tall thin wiry vampire with short blond hair that, unusual for a vampire, had grey in it. He'd been with Hadrian for some four hundred years. Something of the born second-in-command, and more stable than Farov, he was heavily relied upon the City Master. "Most of them were criminals of one sort or another before being turned and after, so no need to pity them."

The cell block was a dismal place; Lord Hadrian firmly believed that if you were going to be killed then there was no point in bothering to provide any sort of creature comforts. The cold, damp stone cells were without a single piece of furniture, or windows. The doors were made of heavy metal bars, enchanted and sealed with magic locks. The muggle vampires inside were mostly refugees who had fled into Western Europe from the culling the Masters of Russia were doing. There were a lot of old vampires who had divided Russia into various territories, but they had all agreed that it was time to exterminate the overwhelming masses of young muggle vampires. There were too many, and when there are too may predators and not enough prey there are problems.

The real issue with muggle vampires was that they were incapable of feeding without killing, until they were old enough to have built up the power reserves necessary to learn how. That took some two hundred to five hundred years, depending upon the individual. They also had to feed very night. This meant that a muggle vampire had to kill every night for two hundred years. Russia had previously had a few thousand of these creatures, now less than a hundred were left, most of them in captivity as servants and slaves to the magical vampires. Those that survived, learned, and worked well had the chance to be given some blood from one of the old magical vampires, and allowed to live.

For the ones in these cells there was no chance. Only the strongest and most intelligent of the muggle vampires had been kept. The others had been exterminated. Those that had fled found themselves in the middle of yet another round up being conducted in Europe. They had never had a chance here. Here the City Masters were only really interested in keeping the very best of the overpopulated young magical vampires. Little thought was spared on the muggle ones with so many magical ones available. In Russia there hadn't been very many magical vampires, here there were many.

A muggle vampire was simply an undead. Whatever age they were turned at, they were that age for life. They needed blood to survive, and could only survive on animal blood for short amounts of time. They were only a bit stronger than the average mortal muggle, about on par with professional wrestlers, but no more. Their skin had the stereotypical dead/pale vampire look, they could not move with the silence of the magical ones, and had no real power. They could not magically seduce or hypnotize, and while they had healing magics they were minimal and required a good deal of fresh blood to use.

Rahkesh had determined that to destroy the locket horcrux he would be better off with a muggle vampire. Hadrian had plenty and was happy to do anything to help get rid of Voldemort.

He looked in at the pathetic wretched vampires chained to the walls, and wondered how many had known what they were getting into. Probably not many. They'd probably mostly been turned by older members of the groups that roamed mortal cities. These were mostly young, often teenaged, mortals who had been turned and were so self-obsessed with being vampires that they often weren't aware of magical vampire at all, or of the magical world, or of the City Masters. Too many vampires and it got hard to make sure they were all properly educated. The leaders of these groups turned their favorite mortals as a way to make themselves more powerful. To increase your own social status increase the status of those who obey you. They'd had no idea what species they were joining. Some of them were very young; several could not have been more than twelve when they were turned. They looked like they had probably been drug addicts before then, and almost all had tattoos of their vampire gang symbol. Many had dyed their hair, pierced various body parts, and painted their eyes, as if being a vampire wasn't enough. Now they were just a ragged bunch of soon-to-be-fully-dead corpses.

Rahkesh finally picked out a vampire who had probably been twenty-something when turned, he looked no better or worse than any others, but he was also nearly comatose so he wouldn't notice what was happening as much when the horcrux was destroyed, and him with it.

Rahkesh caught the vampire's chin and looked into his eyes, reaching out he focused on finding conscious thoughts, then asked a question, and came back with an answer. This fellow had been to prison on five count of murder before getting out and turning to being a vampire and child slave trafficker. Rahkesh stunned him and levitated the body out.

"A very unpleasant lot you have here."

"An embarrassment to our species." Ambrosius replied, locking the door to the cell block behind them.

"Any word form Voldemort?"

"Not a peep." Ambrosius said. "Tell me, when you have a large force of vampires, Dementors, werewolves, and magic folk, led by a megalomaniac psychopath trying to rule the world, and not one of them has made a single disturbance in nearly a week, what does it mean?"

"That they're plotting something that will merit another sound beating, since they didn't learn from the last one." Rahkesh said. Ambrosius laughed.

"Ah well. No one is taking this Voldemort fellow too seriously anymore. We've got bigger problems. He himself may be formidable enough I suppose. But clearly his army wasn't much of match for us the last time we fought."

"How many did we lose?" Rahkesh asked. He'd never gotten the final death count form the battle at Hadrian's manor.

"Eighteen. Ten of which were apprentices to various old vampires and City Masters. We also lost one guard, and a herbologist. Of the other six none were of any particular importance. Minor players in the entourage of various City Masters. They'll be missed of course; they got that far so it's too bad. But no real loss. And the younger vampires were quick to take advantage of the openings." Ambrosius said with a shrug. "Is there anything else you need?"

"Yes, actually, a dementor." Rahkesh said with a sigh. "That's going to be the hard part."

"Can't help you there. When we figure out where they are we'll let you know, but somehow the lot of them have vanished."

"Are there many left? I thought the Ateres had destroyed a good many of them."

"There are a lot left. More everyday I should think. There's a lot of death and misery around, and a lot of strong emotions. You notice in the mortal areas there isn't a whole lot of happiness even when something good happens. I'd guess it's because it's all being sucked out of everyone. They're feeding on the muggles too, though not openly. They don't just feed on happiness, they also feed on all strong emotions. Happiness is just the easiest and the preferred target, tastes best. And these days there are plenty of souls and no one keeping the dementors in check. They're probably spawning like crazy."

"Ick."

"Agreed."

-

-

I left some responses to reviews at the top of the chapter.

Some people have been requesting more on the classes. There'll be more now that school's started again.

Review please.


	10. Chapter 10

Apath etica – antibiotics only work on bacteria

coolardan – there is no link. They are unrelated

Crafty – go and reread the prequel. Saul gets his soul torn out and destroyed.

guess & 007 – I've never heard of this series. Are they any good? I thought my idea was very original; don't tell me someone else thought of it first!

Sinya asked a good question, Namach is pronounced Nah-mah-k

Many apologies to everyone reading this from one of the countries that is getting its ass kicked. I couldn't do it anywhere else, had to be Europe. I have no problems with any of those nations, nor do I favor those who got left out, I just closed my eyes and dropped a pencil on the map.

-

Chapter 10

**Harry Potter Sides with Magical Beings – Abandons Homeland**

For over a year we at the Daily Prophet have been trying to get an interview with our long missing young Savior. Yesterday the Boy-who-lived gave this reporter an exclusive interview. In an unknown location, to which I was transported by portkey, he met me in a large sitting room and offered to answer a few questions.

"You've been sending letters for over a year. I'll be out of touch for a while so I thought it would be polite to respond before leaving." Young Mr. Potter said cheerfully.

During our interview, which lasted for nearly two hours, I was able to ask Mr. Potter his opinion about recent events in our country. His replies surprised me. Mr. Potter is fully in support of complete equal rights for all magical being, and does "not regard humans to be superior in any way."

Does this mean that he supports the existence of such creatures as vampires? Yes it does. Not only does Mr. Potter support them he also does not believe them to be dark. When questioned he said only "there is no such thing as dark magic. There is no such thing as light magic. There are no dark beings, there are no light beings. I don't believe in good or evil, with regards to magic or people of any species. The British Ministry if Magic's actions this past year, and for many years, in oppressing other species are despicable and I do indeed approve fully of the retaliation experienced so far."

Not only does Mr. Potter disagree with all of the Ministry's actions, he finds them so embarrassing that he has left the UK altogether and now has a joint citizenship with Spain and Canada. He told me that he never intends to return, and that he finds most witches and wizards in our nation to be "bigoted, judgmental, ignorant and unwilling to learn. They would do better to quit labeling everyone and instead try to learn about other species."

So spells classified as dark don't bother him anymore? That seems to be the case, when questioned Mr. Potter replied that: "Most of them have more than one use, one of which is often as healing magic. Take the cruciatus curse for example; it can be used to heal psychic shock. A dozen children or more die every year because healers aren't allowed to save them. That spell only causes pain when used on those who aren't in psychic shock. When used correctly it saves lives. Most so-called "dark" magics are similar."

And what about Voldemort, recently returned and terrorizing wizarding Britain, who is responsible for summoning the demons who brought this plague upon us?

"I really don't care. I see nothing in Britain worth saving." Mr. Potter said, as he activated the portkey to send me back to the Prophet offices. "Deal with him on your own, which you can't. Maybe when almost all of you are dead or enslaved you'll think to ask for help from the other magical species, many of whom would give it, if they thought you were worth saving."

With a demon brought plague destroying our society, our banks closed by offended goblins, and our savior abandoning us, the future does not look bright for Britain.

---Senior Reporter Rita Skeeter

"Ha! Read that! Even their little pet "savior" has turned against them!" Rianae laughed, tossing the Daily Prophet onto the table. Rahkesh glanced up from his breakfast with carefully prepared boredom.

"The goblins finally got around to closing the banks? About time. I missed the screaming over that." Rahkesh said. "That must have really pushed a lot of people over the edge."

"No shit. It says on the next page that the suicide rate has gone up eighty percent in two weeks." Ally said.

"Did they really assign a kid as their "savior"?" Tyler asked, pulling the paper over to read. "I always thought that was just them being nice and complimentary, they didn't actually do it for real did they?"

"Yep. They decided that a little kid would fight their battles for them." Rahkesh agreed. "My dad used to say someone cursed the common sense out of all of them."

His little lie went unnoticed. He did things like that when he had a reason to reference his home. He only ever spoke of his dad, no one else, no names. It wasn't hard to figure out that at least his last name was fake. It didn't matter here. That wasn't unusual at all at Akren. Over half the students used false names, sometimes part of their name, sometimes the whole thing. Any Akren alumnus looking him up in the AAA directory would find his fake name. And they would know that, regardless of whatever they knew about him otherwise, that was the name they were to use with him unless he specifically gave them permission to use his real name, or any other alias. If he later decided he didn't care he would add in his real name under his Akren one. But that wouldn't change anything. As far as all alumni and the school were concerned "Harry Potter" was his alias, and his real name was Rahkesh Asmodaeus.

Because Akren was on good terms with the Canadian Ministry they had not questioned him when he requested a complete new set of legal documentation. He'd applied twice, once as Rahkesh and once as Harry Potter. His disguises had fooled them, and since there were two alumni working at the Canadian Ministry on helping refugees from Europe get new IDs, if they'd somehow lost theirs, it had been easy. The Canadian Ministry and Akren had a special relationship. The Ministry didn't give them any trouble about "illegal" activities, didn't bother them about anything actually, and in return they got much easier access to the AAA records than anyone else. This meant that if the Ministry was looking to hire someone for a specific job they had the easiest access to the best available. Because Akren's graduates were usually the best in whatever they chose to do the special relationship between the school and the Ministry was much envied by other nations and by special interest groups around the world.

Rahkesh opened his paper to the page on the plague rampaging through Europe. It had been a little over a week and the death toll had passed twelve thousand the previous day. The graveyards were full and the morgues had closed because no one would go to work. Everything had been shut down. Total isolation. Every house sealed off, and barely anything transported anywhere.

The real problem was supplies. Transportation difficulties (because the best magics for cleansing things were thread and bloodmagic) had stopped a lot of shipments. In addition several rogue werewolf packs and troops of angry vampires had been stopping all shipments going into the affected countries. The City Masters had acted quickly to stop the vampires, but getting the werewolves under control was requiring a good deal more effort.

Remus, now in Spain with friends, was working for the Spanish Ministry trying to track down and clam some of the packs. Rahkesh had been rather worried when he'd heard about it. But Remus had (politely) told him to mind his own business. He was quite capable of taking care of himself. Rahkesh had responded by giving him a second dose of luck potion, the one that had been Ron's, taken from his body by Tonks. Why Ron hadn't used it was anybody's guess, he'd had it with him.

Today's article was about falling morale, increasing desperation, depression, and looting by people who just didn't care anymore if they lived or died. There was also a problem of increased local violence and drug use. Someone had killed several healers because they "weren't doing anything" to stop the plague.

With the hospitals closed people had begun dumping ill relatives in the streets and locking them out of their houses. Anyone with so much as a sniffle was assumed to be infected, and often were immediately executed or thrown out of their homes by people claiming they "had no choice". Often as not it was just a common cold or allergies. They could have invited one of the many vampires offering their services as plague detectors to help, but most people refused to do that. And if someone they had left on the streets did get their blood tested, their family wouldn't believe the results because vampires were all "liars and mercenaries". Several times vampires had attacked those calling them liars for trying to help. And that hadn't done anything but continue the anti-vampire attitude. The whole situation was a total loss and most of the world had completely written off a huge portion of Europe.

Rahkesh put aside the paper and went back to his breakfast, wondering what had happened to Voldemort. He assumed he'd removed his forces, after having his vampires identify the healthy. And was currently doing what everyone else was – waiting out the plague. He could even have snuck into another country and begun trying to build a new support base there, ignoring Britain now, since it was barely habitable. It seemed Voldemort's dream of world domination might not be going anywhere, unless he could find a new support base and convince them he really was able to take over the magical humans.

"This reporter sounds like she wants a change." Daray finally said after reading the article twice (having stolen Rahkesh's copy of the paper). "I wonder how many will be swayed?"

"Few." Silas said, "more likely they'll condemn the poor kid. Seems like a smart fellow."

Rahkesh privately thought Silas might be right. But that was okay. He didn't really care. And he still had that book on Parselmagic that he was jointly publishing. That would make people think, even if they didn't act.

The book was almost completed. Rahkesh had gone to a few of the Parselmouth vampires, in disguise as Harry Potter. In order to avoid detection he had them send their correspondence to an old crumbling abandoned monastery – which happened to be owned under an alias by Professor Namach – who had a magical letter transport system in place that forwarded everything to him. The ancient vampire was finding the whole thing highly amusing, and thought it was long overdue that the parselmouths reintroduce themselves to the world.

The book would be published in six languages all over the world, to begin with, and probably more languages later. Profits were being split evenly, and Rahkesh suspected that they would all get a lot out of it. Especially in Britain, where his name alone would sell many copies.

Finding out that the "dark" magic of parseltongue was actually a healing gift would be quite a shock to the whole system. Rahkesh wondered what all the people who had feared him for his ability would say then.

XXX

There were a total of seventeen interlocking circles on the floor. The blood had dried in the hours he'd been working, but with the high levels of magic moving at accelerated speeds through the runes the blood had not actually sealed itself to the floor. When he was finished he could peel it off the floor like glue off his fingers.

Rahkesh drew the knife in a continuing line from around the center of his back, and under one arm, linking the cut to the coiled runes on his sides. He then pulled the knife up, tilting it almost flat against his skin so that it cut in sideways barely deep enough to bleed.

This knife was one of the school ones, pure silver with slivers of Skiasis fang down each side of the blade. The Skiasis must have been a large one; the fang pieces were nearly as long as Rahkesh's hand. Skiasis were a variety of sea serpent that lived under the Antarctic ice shelf. Normally they were not used in any sort of potion brewing or magic, but for this particular bloodmagic ritual they were the best available.

Rahkesh tipped his head to the side and reached over with both hands to find the points he needed to draw the cuts through. As the rituals he did became longer and more complex he had varied his methods some. For almost every ritual he now drew the runes he needed onto his skin beforehand with a special acid. It only burned the uppermost layer of skin, and vaporized out of the cut so it didn't interfere. It left behind a dark colored indentation that could be felt and seen. This way Rahkesh could draw the necessary cuts by following the lines. It made the bloodmagic much easier than memorizing the exact placement of everything.

This ritual was the first in a set of eight that concealed his scent completely. Skiasis were so useful for scent concealing rituals because the sea serpents themselves had absolutely no scent at all. Finishing it gave Rahkesh another advantage against anyone who might be following or trying to identify him.

The final cut ended, linking with the first above his right ear. Rahkesh laid the knife on the floor in front of him and began working on undoing the magic on the floor. While doing bloodmagic part of his magic left him and flowed out into the runes drawn in blood across the floor. The last of it had returned to his body and settled into the bloodmagic there as he had finished. Now he needed to undo the webs on the floor or they would catch his magic again as he tried to move past them.

Rahkesh peeled up each circle and crushed them, returning them to liquid in his hands. By the time he was done not only was he dripping blood everywhere but the floor was covered in it. Rahkesh removed the last one and left the room, pressing his hand to the imprint on the wall to clean it as the door shut behind him.

Sygra was waiting for him in the small room beyond the bloodmagic chamber. His robe hung from the stand and a second knife, which he would have had to use if he'd needed to use a different chamber, was sitting on the plain stone bench. Usually everyone signed up for the bloodmagic chambers in advance, and if something didn't feel right they cancelled and waited. Rahkesh hadn't signed up, but had acted on impulse to finish this set that morning. He'd been lucky to find the chamber open. Whoever had signed up for five hours that morning had cancelled.

_Your smell makes my tongue itch_. Sygra told him, flickering her forked tongue at the air. Rahkesh chuckled, remembering that snakes smelled with their tongues.

_Sorry, I'll bathe. I told you it would be boring to wait for me here._

_Not entirely._ Sygra said mysteriously. Moving her head back and forth. She waited until he'd put the robe one before curling around his neck, carefully avoiding the blood dripping from his forehead and ears.

_What do you mean?_ Rahkesh asked.

_There were others here watching you and talking. Apparently they do not realize I can understand them a bit._ Sygra said, sounding very smug. She had some difficulty understand what people said, but that was from a still-growing vocabulary and difficulty with accents. She also tended to miss tonal inflections that gave meaning to things like sarcasm, on the other hand she could often smell out emotions with remarkable skill.

_Who was here?_ Rahkesh asked, walking towards the showers. For once Namach hadn't been waiting for him to finish.

_The three big cats. The females only._ Sygra said. Rahkesh let out a long distressed hiss. Sometimes he really, really, hated having one of the walls of the bloodmagic chambers being a one-way window. His three lion fae stalkers weren't giving up. As of yet their lion hadn't confronted him, but it was only a matter of time, and Rahkesh didn't like getting into fights over nothing.

_What were they saying?_ Rahkesh asked, not sure he wanted to know.

_Giggling and snickering. They like your skin, and your eyes, and hair. Why would anyone like hair? Or want to have it? It's disgusting._ Sygra muttering, falling off topic. Being a snake she didn't understand the furred life forms. _They smelled amused._ Sygra added.

Rahkesh lifted Sygra off his shoulders and placed her across the doorframe of his shower. He wasn't likely to be attacked here, but he was far too tired to keep watch as he should. Sygra smelled the air and settled, letting him know there was no one around.

_The half-veela with the scarred hands was here, with the ancient vampire._ Sygra told him. Rahkesh translated that into Professor Ahmad and Professor Namach. _They both thought the big cats were very, very, amusing. _Sygra snickered at Rahkesh's pained groan. The professors would no doubt never let him forget this.

_Anything else?_ Rahkesh asked, as he tried to get the now drying blood out from behind his ears. The soap here was a specialty kind specifically for blood, but it also made his skin itch.

_The big cats left once the other two showed up. The half-veela thinks you have a nice ass._

Rahkesh's head slammed into the wall as he turned to stare at the basilisk up above the door. Sygra snickered again. _You have a lot of admirers. The half-veela smelled very interested. The ancient vampire found this amusing too. _

_He finds everything everyone does amusing._ Rahkesh muttered, cleaning flaking bits of dried blood off his sponge. Great, just great, Ahmad was interested in him.

_The ancient vampire started laughing and said that if the half-veela was that interested he'd better get a new identity and leave Akren, because otherwise you would never notice he existed._ Sygra added. _They both laughed. _

Rahkesh's refusal to even consider any of Akren's students, graduates, or professors had initially amazed and startled a lot of people in the rather promiscuous school population. Rahkesh had shrugged it all off and called it common sense and an intent on survival. There were several deaths a year in the school that were directly caused by messed up relationships. Fortunately the attention hadn't lasted long; just long enough for everyone to hear about it and for Rahkesh to get annoyed enough at the questions to taser a few people. There was no way Ahmad had missed that.

_What are you going to do?_

_He hasn't said anything to me, so I'll ignore it._ Rahkesh replied. In all likelihood Ahmad would never bother approaching him at all. If he'd been observing Rahkesh he'd know that he left the school frequently with his friends to go to one of the muggle cities nearby where he had several partners, it was a rare night when one of them wasn't available.

_The half-veela doesn't know I can understand him. The ancient vampire does, after the half-veela left he told me your pack of admirers were highly entertaining. _

_I'm going to have to recommend him to those lion fae, see how much he likes having that trio following him everywhere._ Rahkesh muttered. Knowing full well he'd do no such thing. To begin with Namach would probably cheerfully fuck the lot of them. Secondly if he got angry Rahkesh would be in big trouble.

_I thought you were sending them after Daray?_

_I tried that. Turns out Daray changed his mind. He's not interested in them. He wants the lion._ Rahkesh said. Daray had caught a good look at Fengyang's flexibility during a knife fight and decided he'd rather have the lion than the three lionesses. Which was bound to start all sorts of problems because Fengyang wasn't likely to agree. And since Daray lived next to Rahkesh, Rahkesh would probably be leaving by the secret passages to avoid the fights in the hallways. _Of course he also said he wouldn't object to all four of them._

_He's weird._ Sygra stated.

XX

The sun was setting, it was only early afternoon but the light was a dim red already. The sun was glaring out from a gap between the ominous black masses flowing in from the western sky. Everything from the sky to the lakes to the trees was tainted red and black, giving the valley a hellish look. High lumps of rumpled black clouds groaned and barked threateningly with approaching thunder and the air hug dense and heavy with rain. The cliff tops stank of ozone.

Rahkesh ducked two blue curses and leaped off the bank, hitting the lower trail running. Behind him silver spells lashed a tree and tore it apart. A massive groaning snap followed as the tall evergreen came tumbling down, missing him by inches. They'd have to put it back up and heal it later. Rahkesh dodged a flying bit of bright orange. His left ankle had a bone deep gash in it and was bleeding heavily. But there was to time to stop now. He lowered his wand and tossed a healing spell at the wound, missing it as he ran. He tried again and hit. The blood flow stopped but the ache remained, telling him the flesh had only barely healed. Rahkesh almost reached for his bloodmagics before he stopped himself - professor Ahmad had said they'd be disqualified immediately. He had a no bloodmagic rule for everything. He claimed that they needed to learn to do things without, before learning to do them with. Probably correct but extremely irritating.

With no blood trailing him like a red flag he spun left at a sharp angle and raced for a dense clump of young trees. He would be safe in there. Hard to see, and he could get to the stream or older forest of tall hardwoods nearby. In between the tress were small flowers and a few herbs, just barely surviving on what little light penetrated the dense young conifers. They would also cover his smell – four of the students after him were werewolves.

Had he been in a real situation Rahkesh would also have activated his one bloodmagic piece that concealed scent. But that would be an automatic disqualification, and so he'd have to make do other ways.

The purpose of this training exercise, an optional tactics class, was to cross a three square kilometer stretch of woodlands, meadows, and a stream without being seen, or more correctly, caught or knocked unconscious. There were ten students on "guard duty" watching from atop cliffs and hills, with ominoculars. They could not leave their posts but were trying to capture or injure everyone else. There had been thirty who had decided to join in this exercise and try to cross the area. Eight were down, one captured.

Optional classes like this were taught whenever the professors felt like teaching them. This was part of one of the tactics classes, but it had no official enrollment, anyone who wanted to join in could. Students signed in for lectures, demonstrations, or training exercises, and if they went to enough, and did well enough in each, they would be marked down as having taken the course. There was no homework for this class. Like a lot of Akren material it was all hands-on learning. It was something most students attended when they had time left over after their work for whatever classes they were officially taking.

In the trees he went to his hands and knees, then onto his fingertips and toes, lying almost flat and scuttled sideways under the lower branches of one of the taller trees. The advanced tracking class was going to come through later to track the students who were trying to cross the test area. Following all of the movements they were making back and forth all over the place was going to be awful, but if they were able to follow his trail all the way without getting lost once then he didn't get a full grade on the exercise, even if he made it across.

Leaning over he spelled his ankle again, and finally the ache stopped. Then Rahkesh touched his boots and set a light bit of transfiguration to them, so that the print they left had no clear marks. The advanced tracking class was very good, and he expected that even if most of the remaining students made it across the test area, few of them would get full credit because of the trackers. Next he called up some wind and used that to blurr the plants he had crushed or leave he'd overturned. If he'd spelled the actual ground it would have left a residue. Using wind left no magical sign.

Another incentive was that if he did really well at hiding himself he might be invited to join the tracking exercises and the ambush training. The beginner one was optional, the others you had to be invited to, after proving your use of skills learned in the first level one, by using them during other classes. Rahkesh had done the beginner tracking the previous winter. He was doing the one taught when there was no snow now.

"Are we allowed to attack the guards?" Ally asked, Rahkesh nearly put a knife in her throat before he recognized her. Ally was stealthy, more so than he was, she'd come up beside him so silently he hadn't even felt the air stir.

"I don't think so." Rahkesh said. "There's a trio of vampires near the stream."

"Ah. And if we toss them about the guards will go after them, we win." Ally said, following his thinking.

"And have the vampire students at our throats."

"Nothing new."

"No. And these _are_ the same three that we so loudly advocating enslaving mortal humans at breakfast." Rahkesh said.

"Oh. Then we must." Ally decided. She'd already cursed one of them that day, giving him puss-oozing genital warts. Apparently she wasn't finished yet.

"Take the left. I'll run around right. Blow the earth out from under them; they'll collapse into the stream. It's almost dry. The banks are steep and the bottom rocky, with any luck they'll be injured." Rahkesh decided.

"Any chance they could use the banks as cover?"

"No. There's at least four guards with a clear shot in. Once they're in we'll cross by the fallen trees at the pools."

"I have less ground to cover. I'll drop back and set up a time delayed smoke wave further down." Ally decided.

Ally vanished into the thick trees as quickly and silently as she'd come. Rahkesh moved right under the lower branches, avoiding touching the trunks to keep from knocking the young trees about and giving himself away.

The three vampires were pressed close to the ground in some thick tall reeds along the rocky bank of the stream. From behind them Rahkesh was coming down a hill and could see them clearly. The tall reeds in front blocked them from the guards view, but anyone behind could tell where they were. The gravely bottom of the dry streambed was more than a meter below them. If toppled off the edge they'd have a good fall.

A few seconds later a Rahkesh sniffed the air, smelling smoke. Looking downstream he caught sight of Ally's fake, a dense cloud of black smoke. It didn't behave like smoke should, moving sideways instead of up, filling in the gaps between the trees, giving cover from sight and smell.

From where he was Rahkesh could see all three vampires, smelling the air and talking. On the other side of them Ally appeared from between some of the tall grasses that grew along the bank of the dry stream. She caught his eye and raised her wand.

They cast simultaneously, silent spells blasting the earth out from under the three vampires. The crack and screams of crumbling earth, combined with the smoke drifting into the area, blocked Rahkesh and Ally from view as they both jumped down the bank, ran across the open stream bed, and leaped up the far side.

Rahkesh landed on his shoulder and rolled. On this side of the stream the forest was older, the pines tall and the ground carpeted with needles. With the sun setting under the approaching storm it was silent and very dark. He turned to face away from Ally – she would give warning if anything came from that direction. This way he could see into the forest, the ridge top where the guards waited, and the three vampires in the stream bed.

None of the three had landed upright, and only one had cast a shield. Bright bursts of light and the sharp twang of a bowstring split the air. The two unshielded vampires crumpled under a wash of color and few sharp screams. When the light and dust cleared they were both down, one bound in chains and blinded, the other covered in whip-like lacerations, his legs transfigured into rocks, and an arrow pinning him through his arm to the remains of a fallen tree.

The third vampire had left his companions as soon as he hit the stream bed, rolling down stream and behind some larger rocks. As the spells hit he scrambled up the bank and dug in next to some loose roots. His shield vanished quickly - the spell signature and light would give away his location.

Being able to manage an excellent shield or attack with little to no warning was something every Akren student learned very quickly. The tests for graduation included a dueling segment, and the results went on your public record. The third vampire and the guards had all reacted perfectly. The other two had not and would subsequently lose a good deal of their standing amongst their fellows. Worse, the incident would have been recorded by the professor. Who would work with other professors in deciding which pieces of the dueling trial to test them with. They could both expect a test on their defense and offense reaction time during their last year of school. The tests could be repeated, which was why they occurred not during a scheduled time but randomly, as the professors chose, throughout the last year of school.

Ally moved up under the cover of the tall old trees until she was near Rahkesh. Rahkesh turned aside to congratulate her, and froze as something moved in the deep shadows past her. Ally caught the look on his face and spun, Rahkesh attacked as someone leaped at them from the trees. His blast of stunners and blinding hex were met with flesh eating curses and a diversion shield.

Ally came in from under Rahkesh's spells and tackled their attacker, knocking them flat and driving one knee into the groin, the other into the solar plexus while her hands with two little knives crossed their throat.

Their opponent brushed Ally's knives side with a metal armguard, wrapped a leg around her, grabbed her under the armpit and yanked, flipping them both around. Ally held her ground, lifting her other leg and dragging it down her opponent's pinned one, the thick knobby rubber toe of her boot tearing off all the skin. She then slammed her head forward, meeting her opponent's head with a hard thunk. Rahkesh, now behind them, tossed a thin wire around the unknown attacker's throat when his head bounced back, and drove a knee into his lower back. Ally lunged aside and spun to pin his arms.

Fire exploded from empty air, and a bone shattering hex flew, missing Rahkesh's face by a hair. A throwing star cut into Ally's hair hear her throat and Rahkesh's wire was suddenly banished, flying out of his hands.

Rahkehs felt the thunderbird surge up, lightning flashed around his tightly fisted hands. He ground his teeth and reigned in the magic. The approaching storm was enormous, and the lightning magic was singing through his veins like a siren's call, giving him a high like that a controlled substance might impart. He backed away fast, he was in no shape for this right now. Not with so little control. In the distance thunder boomed and Rahkesh felt lightning flash through his body.

Rahkesh spun away, Ally was already out and had somehow gotten to their attacker's other side, placing him between them. Had he been there. As soon as the fire vanished so did their opponent.

Rahkesh immediately looked up. No one ever looked up in a fight, and he'd seen battles won and weak vampires crush their opponents by getting above to attack from an unexpected direction.

Daray's leering fanged grin appeared from between the limbs of the pine above them. He was hanging by his knees from one of the branches.

"Daray!" Rahkesh hissed furiously, just barely remembering not to raise his voice.

"Your deranged little shithead!" Ally spat up at him "son of a pig whore!"

"Good to see you too sweetling." Daray replied cheerfully, grin getting even wider.

"Criminally stupid reptile, what was that for?" Ally snapped.

"Sorry about that, mistaken identity. Thought you were those wretches Drew and Marima." Daray explained, dropping down to land silently beside them.

"Hunting?" Ally asked.

"Yes."

"I thought you'd already beaten Drew."

"I did. Now I want Marima, she's sticking close to Drew because she knows I'm after her blood and doesn't know that I beat Drew. I didn't give him permission to tell anyone, and he doesn't want to make me angry so he won't tell. If he has any sense he'll stay out of it when I do catch them. I drugged him after I beat him, and it's still in his system. It's a keyword activated potion." Daray explained.

Keyword activated potions didn't usually last long at all, barely a day. They were a low level bloodmagic, but very specific, requiring the blood of the victim and controller. However while in the system, if the correct word was spoken by the potions brewer, the potion would activate. Usually incapacitating the victim instantly. Drew would be very careful indeed.

"One of these days one of the other vampires is going to come hunting YOU." Ally warned him.

"Maybe. Probably. I already had a chat with Hilda – she's the current leader of the vampire students. We get along fine, and she'll be gone next year so I suppose I can wait to take over." Daray said with a shrug. He had apparently concluded that he couldn't outfight Hilda yet.

"I thought you wanted to get rid of her sometime around mid winter?" Rahkesh asked.

"My demon form is sick, and it's weakening me. I may have to hold off on that." Daray said. He began casting spells to cover their tracks and all signs of the fight. Rahkesh went to help.

"You okay?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes you?" Daray asked, healing his injuries. The skin on his leg grew back and repaired itself as the bruises faded.

"Looks painful. Might not want to let Ally tackle you next time." Rahkesh snickered. Ally might be the lightest of the three of them but she was nearly as tall and she sure knew how to throw her weight around. She was also the most aggressive, more so than even the alpha werewolves.

"She's an American. They play that sport of theirs…football. Stupid thing." Daray muttered.

"Yeah. And you're a big tough bloodmagic enhanced vampire." Ally said cheerfully, pinching Daray's backside hard. She and Rahkesh laughed as he yelped and smacked at her. "What would your grandmother say?"

"She'd try to recruit you to the family." Daray replied. "Except she'd be worried you'd take over."

XX

_Parselmagic is quite possibly the single most misunderstood branch of magic to ever exist. What makes this so odd is that parselmagic is also the most powerful blood gift to ever exist. For all the powers a magical human can be born with, parslemagic is the strongest. _

_What is it? Parselmagic is a healing gift. A trained parseltongue can put a decapitated head back on a body and reconnect it to bring the person back to life, even if head and body have been separated for a full minute. _

_It is strange indeed that the greatest healing ability in the world is the most forgotten of all magic abilities. Parselmagic can cure almost anything, it is also the only magic that can literally bring the dead back to life…if they haven't been dead for too long. It can even undo the effects of the Killing Curse, when wielded by an especially powerful and well-trained user. _

_Parselmagic, like all magical gifts, did not originally occur naturally. Several thousand years ago the greatest magical healer of all time, Aesculapius, took it upon himself to invent a magical gift and insert it into the fabric of all human magic, so that in the future some small portion of the population would be born with a great healing power. Aesculapius searched for over a century to find a way to create such a power and add it into all existing magic. Eventually he discovered that if he followed the magic of the basilisk he could bend the natural fabric of magic, to add in a new gift. This new gift was the ability to heal. _

_However Aesculapius soon realized that the new gift was a delicate one, and easily injured. If a child with the power was badly injured at a very young age the new healing gift would rise up to save their life…but to be used at such a young age would break the delicate new gift, rendering it useless. _

_Why did this healing gift break so easily? Because of its great power. Magic runs through the body and no child has a strong and large enough body to contain such a power, and so even as it saves the child's life, it breaks. The healing gift Aesculapius had created was so powerful it often destroyed itself. And so Aesculapius decided he needed to create a way to mark all children with this great healing power, so that everyone would know that they needed to be protected from using their ability until such time as their bodies could channel it._

_Once again Aesculapius turned to snakes. He had one as a familiar and had spent much of his adult life finding cures for their venom and ways to utilize their venoms in potions. It was natural for him to look to them for help. He discovered that because he had used Basilisk magic to enable the permanent creation of the healing gift he could also use it mark those who carried the great healing ability. So Aesculapius's healing gift took on a second part, in addition to being the most powerful healers to ever exist those with the gift could also speak to snakes. The ability to speak to snakes opened up a whole new branch of magic, because spells done in the snake tongue differed from other magic, and the incredible healers quickly learned to harness that power in their healing. _

_One of these magics that the healers learned to create was a repository of knowledge. Because the gift was not passed on by blood, but appeared at random, it had to be a piece of magic that jumped around intact. Parseltongues learned quickly that they could store knowledge inside this magic, and that knowledge would then become accessible to any parseltongues born after. After several thousand years parselmagic contains within it a repository of knowledge greater than any of the greatest libraries. Almost all of it pertains to healing and to snakes, but in the magic lies every bit of information every living parselmagic user could ever put into it. _

_So why has parselmagic been forgotten? Because it is rare, and because while parselmagic users are born with an incredible healing ability, they are not otherwise any different from any other human being. _

_In any random sample of humans there will be those who are honorable and prefer to help others, and then there are those who are greedy, those who seek great power over others, those who have no morals and think nothing of crime. Parseltongues are no different. In any random sample there will be a complete range of personalities. _

_So a few parseltongues turn to crime and violence, and because they could speak to snakes it came naturally to them to recruit snakes to aid them. And many people are frightened of snakes to begin with. Often parseltongues would find that people feared them because they could speak to snakes, even as those same people demanded their aid as healers. To be told that people hate you, and yet you have to help them, will make anyone back away from society, from humanity. Many parseltongues got so angry that they refused to heal, which in turn led people to hate them even more. _

_The cycle towards becoming violent and dangerous was almost always started by the fear and hate thrown at parseltongues by others, and so magical humans not only alienated the greatest healers of all time, but managed to make many parseltongues actively hate all others. _

_Parseltongues have always been rare, but with the confusion and hate and fear most people forgot what the ability to speak to snakes really meant; a healing ability above all others. Now in many places in the world children exhibiting the ability to speak to snakes are killed, or hated and feared by their parents. Children raised in these often abusive or negligent situations do not grow up to be healers: they have only ever been treated badly by everyone, and have no wish to help anyone but themselves. So they often turn to violence and crime, or draw away from all civilization and keep to themselves. In addition to treating them poorly parents do not know that their children are healers, and do not know the fragility of this ability in children. As a result these children are not protected. A young parseltongue, upon seeing someone dying, will have a natural inclination to heal, and will often overtax their ability without anyone knowing it. While the healing ability is broken the ability to speak to snakes remains. And this is why the healing ability has been forgotten, despite its massive power. Most parseltongues in recent centuries have not had active healing abilities because some time when they were children they used their ability to heal themselves or others, and permanently damaged their healing power. _

_Having crushed Aesculapius's great healing gift damages only the healing magic. These people are not mentally or otherwise magically damaged. However they often grow up completely isolated and abused. Had their abilities been fully functional they would have had access to the knowledge and experiences of all past parseltongues to help them. Early on parseltongues learned to put advice and good memories into the magic for these unfortunate children. But with the healing abilities broken and disrupted they cannot access these memories. _

_The best way to fight misunderstanding is with the truth and good information. This book was written to showcase the amazing power of the greatest magical gift. Here is the first ever explanation of parselmagic and all it varieties and abilities. This is also a guide for young parseltongues working to learn to use their power. For them and for those who are curious several chapters on parselmagic of the snake variety have been added, including an explanation of the relationship of parseltongues and snakes, and some of abilities many parseltongues display, such as the ability to turn into snakes. _

XXX

Rahkesh closed the book and looked over to Sygra. It was the latest draft of the short opening chapter to the book on parseltongue he was jointly authoring. Sygra had listened in silence as he read to her.

_I think it is good. I think it might make people think. Though why anyone would ever fear a healer I do not understand_

_Many humans fear all snakes and anything related to them. _Rahkesh answered with a shrug, he had never understood.

_How irrational. _

_Agreed. Perhaps this will bring some parseltongues we don't know about out of the woodwork. There have to be more of them. _In the back of the book was the address of a retired Indian healer who was also a parseltongue. He had offered to act as a contact and mentor for any young parseltongues who showed up after reading their book. After him the son of the Master of Venice had offered, once the mortal healer was dead. After him another would take over.

_I have a question, but I'm not sure you'll want to answer. How did you lose you healing ability?_

_I was hit by a killing curse. _

_And Voldemort. _

_I have some idea…he may have been badly abused at his orphanage. That's a place where children without parents get sent. _

_If any parseltongues do follow the address, will you go to meet them?_

_Possibly._ Rahkesh answered, he hadn't really decided. It would depend on the situation with Voldemort and the demons.

XX

Rahkesh raised a hand to knock on the doors to professor Namach's rooms, but they unlocked themselves and opened before he could. He assumed that meant that he could enter. Namach had summoned him magically, something about the plan to open the portals in Mexico to call on Sharahak.

Inside Eli was out on the balcony, basking in the sun. He didn't notice Rahkesh at all. The lizard was still shedding, dry pale scales without their usual color flaking off. Namach had a spell on his rooms so that they all automatically floated into a large vat in a corner. Rahkesh stayed away from the windows that opened onto the balcony and looked around, fining Cyala, Namach and Daray on the couches. In winter Namach went for a cozy look, in summer the furniture changed to something closer to Greek or Roman style. Except in the finest white silks and velvets available.

"When you first retrieved this from the Department of Mysteries I honestly didn't know what was in it. I'd left it behind in a little cottage I owned in…oh…it would have been 15 BC. When I left the magic failed during a meteor shower, a rival vampire raided the place. After I killed him I missed this on my way out. Some wizard found it. Who knows where it was when the Department of Mysteries got hold of it. When I heard the description of it from a fellow I interrogated a few centuries ago I recognized the description, but I couldn't remember what it was. It had been an awfully long time." Namach said.

He was tipping a large rectangular container made of bits of chips of blue diamonds from side to side. It had no handles and no openings, it appeared to simply be a block of blue diamonds, but the light glinting through it showed a dark liquid inside, indicating that it was hollow. "I've been searching for months through my old libraries. This here," he said, handing the container across to Cyala, "is blood from an alpha demon."

"A what?"

"Demonic hierarchy. I'm assuming an alpha demon is one of the top forms. Not that anyone knows for sure. I had it in my records that one of the elves took one sniff at it and identified it as an alpha demon. Since they've been at war with the demons for several billion years they'd probably know demon blood by smell. That's not the point. The point is that it is very similar to Daray, except the magics are more developed." Namach said.

"Ah. I now have a name for what I am." Daray said cheerfully, "an alpha demon. Does that mean we rule the species?"

"No. I'd image arch demons are a bit above you." Rahkesh said, walking into the sitting area to join them. "Which we can all be thankful for; I can only image the soap-opera style horror of having you in the demon government."

Cyala and Namach chuckled while Daray glared and snorted a bit of fire out his nose at Rahkesh.

"Urgh." Rahkesh complained. "Fire snot, how disgusting."

Rahkesh hadn't seen Daray in demon form in some time, and was shocked at how far he had deteriorated. The once shiny black scales and wings were faded to a dark gray and a flaky look not unlike Eli's shedding scales. The skin on his wings was dry and looked rippled, and he had cracked peeling bits around the areas where the wing claws met the wing skin and scales. His eyes were dulled and his eye ridges cracked. On the whole he looked like one sick demon.

"Is it contagious?" Rahkesh asked, making a show of looking Daray over. "I hadn't realized it was that bad."

"Transforming is getting painful." Daray replied.

"What is the schedule for trying to open the portals in Mexico?" Rahkesh asked eyes not leaving his very ill-looking friend.

"Probably mid-winter solstice." Cyala said darkly. "We're having some difficulty figuring out how they work. Soon we'll go pick up the vampire using them and have a chat with him. It seems the rituals used have to be more advanced each time because the portal weakens. However as far as we can tell _he's _receiving messages from someone else telling him how to open the portals."

"Rahkesh do you have any samples of your blood left from while you were back in time, shortly after drinking the dragon's blood?" Namach asked.

"Yes. The Chachapoyaro healers took a lot to study, I brought it all back." Rahkesh said.

"I want to take a look at it and study any possible changes that would make contacting Sharahak difficult. The sample he has might not recognize your current blood and we may have to use the old samples." Namach explained. Rahkesh blinked hard and inwardly cursed himself for not thinking of that.

"Could our traitorous vampire be receiving messages from the missing druid?" Rahkesh asked.

"Possibly. That is driving me crazy, I've been looking more at the samples of blood and magic from the altar, I _know_ I've seen it before. It's so familiar. But different enough that I can't place it. It's almost like someone I knew underwent a severe magical change, but I don't know who." Namach growled. Rahkesh winced and shut down his magical senses at the anger the ancient was giving off. Namach was not used to being stumped at any problem.

"In the mean time we'll compare this stuff to Daray's blood. Magically it might give us some clue of what's supposed to happen." Cyala said, examining the blue diamond container. "Anything from the elves about the possible demon invasion?"

"Ferraidar got into a shouting match with the entire High Council." Namach said dryly, amused. "Barking insults fit to make a drunken sailor blush. They've only confirmed that these are the tactics the demons would be most likely to use, and used the last few times. He's also identified the official subspecies name of all of our various demons and demon parts. But we already knew they were different subspecies. Anyhow the Council wasn't too pleased, and Ferraidar basically told them all to go fuck themselves. He's bringing back a complete list on demonic abilities in a few days. Unfortunately they're fighting a war with the demons on several fronts and it's slowing everything down."

"What I'd really like to know is at what point the elves will join in to help us if the demons do attack in force." Rahkesh said.

"No idea. The High Council isn't fond of most of the sentient intelligent life forms on Earth. They'd be just as happy to exterminate the entire human species as a way to keep the demons from enslaving us. Hit them so that they face a lack of slave labor. Tactical battle move, they _really_ don't like mortal humans. And only barely tolerate vampires. I understand last time they actually brought that idea up for a vote Ferraidar locked half the High Council in a dungeon until the vote was over." Namach said, smiling evilly.

"He did _what_?" Rahkesh asked incredulously. "Why?"

"Because he follows the belief that mortals exist purely to amuse elves and the world would be much more boring without them." Namach said, bringing a very un-lady-like snort from Cyala.

"Would the military practicality of removing a possible slave force get the elves to try to vote to remove humans again?" Rahkesh asked.

"Possibly. Hard to say." Namach responded.

"The other consideration of course is that elves are incapable of existing in the demon realm, and humans are. That could be turned into a strong working partnership to keep the demons under control or remove them entirely." Rahkesh said.

"True. Though at present the elves do fine stopping the demons on their own. Having death dragons helps with that." Cyala agreed.

"About that, do you think the elves might have more luck at figuring out the full effects of the dragon's blood on me than we have?" Rahkesh asked.

"Their researchers might be willing to try just out of curiosity. Since no mortal has survived drinking dragon's blood before." Namach said after a long moment to think about that. An unreadable look passed between him and Cyala. "I think they would." The two vampires did not look pleased at the prospect. Rahkesh wondered if he'd missed something. They both seemed disgruntled at the idea.

Daray rolled his eyes around at the two ancient vampires. "I don't think the elves will kill him if they find out he's got some extraordinary abilities developing." He said, coughing hard for a moment his shook his head around, rattling the oddly dry and dusty spines that hung around his neck like a mane. "Like you they'd probably just be curious."

"Perhaps." Cyala agreed. And somehow Rahkesh thought that that had not been what had caused the reaction from the two ancient vampires.

The bloodmetal armguards Cyala wore shifted a little like living vines, the red and gold slivers twisted and writhed, a tiny blue gem sparked and glowed on the right one. Cyala pressed a finger to it and closed her eyes for a moment. Her eyes opened.

"We've got a mathematical model for the progressing complexity of the rituals used on the portals finished." She said, rising. "I'll keep you updated." She waved Daray down when he went to rise, and handed him a large goblet of blood from thin air. "Drink all of that." As Daray did so she glanced over at Namach. "Make sure it gets to all of his system?" Namach nodded.

Rahkesh smelled the air, opening his magical senses, and realized suddenly the immense power contained in the blood Daray was drinking. Interesting. He'd never been able to sense power in blood before. That blood must be Cyala's, to have that kind of power.

Rahkesh headed for the door, and was surprised to find Namach suddenly beside him in the doorway. The vampire shut the door behind them and turned to him.

"Rahkesh you've done three rituals in the last four days."

"It was no difficulty." Rahkesh objected to the warning note in the ancient vampire's voice.

"I know. That's what concerns me. Have you examined the normal, average rate at which mortal humans are usual performing rituals when they've had as much training as you have?"

"No."

"Perhaps you should. Bloodmagic may be a highly personalized field of magic but you're going through rituals at a rate that I've only seen a few times before, and none of those ended terribly well. Very few bloodmagic users can manage one ritual every four days, let alone three." Namach said. Rahkesh was too startled to respond.

While in the Room of Requirement he'd only done three rituals. He'd done many during his time travel adventure and plenty his first year at Akren. He'd had to stop for some time do to injuries, and he had only one year of actual training, which was why none of his sets had gone beyond the fifth stage yet. He _had_ been speeding up lately, but it hadn't caused too much strain.

"I want you to do a complete check of every one of the sets of runes you have. Sometimes a sudden increase in ease of rituals is a sign of something starting to go very wrong. On the other hand it could just be an effect of the dragon's blood. The added magic and speed of circulation might be making your body accept each new ritual faster."

"I will." Rahkesh agreed. Namach nodded and went back inside. He brushed a hand over Daray's forehead activating all of the younger vampire's bloodmagic, then sat down beside him and bit into his neck to follow the flow of the blood he'd just drunk through his magical and physical system.

Sygra had just woken when he got there. As Rahkesh rolled a thick rug onto the floor his familiar curled up on the edge of the bed nearest him.

_Sygra I'm going to do a check of all my bloodmagics. Can you drop into our connection and observe? I'm looking for anything that's unusual. It might be nearly invisible._

_I will. Did something go wrong?_

"_I don't know. Either there's something wrong. Or something very right._ Rahkesh said, hoping it was the later.

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Please review!

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Just a sorta random poll – I have a lot of original characters, who is your favorite personality? And least favorite. (Not that I'm going to pay any attention since I already have the plot outlined, I'm just curious). If you want to see more of someone mention it, I might be able to work something in, though the major plot is already decided.

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I'm also thinking of removing all of my other old fics soon. 1) I don't like them at all, 2) they're very old, 3) they'll never be updated or revised.

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	11. Chapter 11

nantukoprime – oh damn! I'll have to go read this series. I'd honestly thought I'd come up with something real original.

arcrose – there are more than twenty types of fae, each a subspecies. They're all similar (pointy-ears, magical) but actually very dissimilar. Some are closely related, others (Vascari) are waaaay out there. Perhaps I'll post descriptions at some point on my page.

Elementzero & SaWa-San – oh the fae Council will be back!

apathetica - we'll see Draco once more, and Neville will be back a bit later.

enraptured reader – not at all. I said it "looked like silver" not that it was.

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**I will be leaving soon for my summer field position. Internet access will be limited. I am attempting to post this, and then one more chapter before I leave. After that it may be a few months until I can post again. I AM NOT ABANDONING THIS!!! Do not worry, I'll be back. **

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**I do intend to continue this after the next book comes out, I'm having way too much fun to stop.**

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Chapter 11

"I have never seen such a mess in my life." Haedil said, following Daray into the classroom. The black-eyed Amadan had continued into necromancy with them. He apparently spent half his life observing others doing bloodmagic rituals, looking for ideas to use with his own. This was an excellent thing to do if you had the time. "The walls were just painted in blood. Ordinarily it just destroys by killing or vaporizing, this time he got blown apart."

"Who did?" Rahkesh asked. This sounded interesting.

"Benjamin. Messed up his last ritual." Haedil said cheerfully. "Beautifully bloody mess." The other werewolves in their class glared at the fae, but he ignored them. And they weren't about to attack now that Benjamin was dead, especially since everyone had been waiting for him to die anyway. Respect for the dead did not exist at Akren. The more students who managed to die the better for everyone else. If you died doing something stupid, you got laughed at, then someone else took your spot.

"He should have stopped last year." Daray opined. "After he almost died during his poison removal trials." In order to get into this class they had had to complete a bloodmagic piece that allowed them to remove selected substances, poison, from their blood. Rahkesh and Daray had passed with flying colors, Benjamin had almost died, both during the ritual and during the poison removal following it. His bloodmagic had never recovered from the ritual, which had not been off enough to kill him, but had been off enough to blind him for several weeks. However, his vision had recovered, and despite that the runes never faded like they were supposed to he had chosen to continue taking bloodmagic classes. Since he _had_ technically passed the test no one had stopped him. It was each student's job to know when to stop, or when to ask for advice.

"I was working on my first stage healing ritual when it happened. It's a good thing Professor Namach has the rooms separated and contained so an earthquake in one can't mess up the others. As it was the magical backlash gave me a massive headache in the middle of my ritual. Could have killed everyone else doing rituals at that time. Power hungry fool." Haedil said.

"And now some of the classes will be working on building new containment wards to prevent that." Namach said from directly behind them, having stepped out of a shadow, making everyone flinch. The class found their seats while the ancient vampire went over to the board.

"Weren't there always wards to prevent that?" Rahkesh asked Haedil softly.

"I thought there were." The dark Amadan replied with a shrug.

"Bet he took them down just to test everyone." Daray said softly. Namach glanced over at them with a sharp look. Haedil growled.

"As Haedil was just informing everyone, another of your classmates has managed to meet a thoroughly miserable end over reaching himself in bloodmagic." Namach said, leaning on the edge of the desk in the front. "Can anyone tell me why someone would reasonably want to continue bloodmagic despite having almost died from it and never fully recovered?"

"Power." Daray replied.

"Why?" Namach asked back. The class went silent thinking that over.

"Because if he succeeded he would have greater power." Hanashi, the class's other Amadan, answered.

"Would he have? What is power?' Namach prodded gently. When no one replied he sighed and tried again "Most people think about the word "power" all wrong. Tell me Rahkesh, what is power?"

"Magical energy?" Rahkesh asked, not following where this was going.

"No. Not necessarily. Power actually has little to do with the overall magical energy a person can wield." When everyone looked completely lost the ancient vampire began to pace across the front of the classroom, dark red robes billowing behind him.

"Think of our current Headmistress, Nvara, she is a mortal. She is nearing eighty. Her greatest ability is the sheer number of animagi she has generated. Six now, in case you were wondering, and more on the way. Her animagi are nothing particularly amazing, except for their number. Yet she can thrash half the world's vampire City Master's and barely break a sweat. Why? Because her precision magic is beyond that of any mortal since Merlin. She can throw a killing curse and take a louse off your head at six hundred meters, without killing any of the cells of your scalp.

That is not power, it is skill. She can also do one amazing shield spell. Her voice magics, for all they are more than those of a great many vampires of more than a few centuries, are just voice magics. She can command almost anyone, but voice magic doesn't work on me, nor any of the fae elders, and alpha werewolves are notorious for being relatively unaffected. She does not have a particularly large amount of magical energy. Yet her influence is immense, she runs the best school of magic in the world.

Power is not how much raw magic you have. It's the use. I destroyed my creator the day I turned five hundred - he was pushing two thousand. Over the next five centuries I hunted down and killed every ancient vampire existing, including one nearing three thousand. I'm not the oldest because I'm the first. I'm the oldest because I killed everyone else." Namach told them, watching the class's surprise. "I was almost labeled a failure at magic as a child because I could not summon a feather from two feet away. But I invented the entire art of bloodmagic in one century. I invented more necromancy than thought possible in the next century, and new branches of threadmagic and soul magic in the century after. By the time I destroyed my creator I could wield magic capable of massively altering the planet's climate and summon a _mountain_ from a million kilometers away from the base.

When most people think of power they think of individuals who can do great feats of magic. I suppose the greatest one in recent history was the deflection of the Catuset Asteroid in 1990, six months before it would have hit Earth and wiped out almost all life. That was done by Landri Samuels, a half-human half-Amadan, working alone. But he was classed as an average wizard, and his fae magics were mostly untrained. He failed the tests to get into Akren. Yet he is referenced as being immensely powerful, by those who don't know better. What actually happened was he spent two years building up what effectively amounted to a magical slingshot and then hurled the magics created during the destruction of his own life at the asteroid, along with a shattering spell and a dispersal spell. The asteroid turned to thick dust.

Power is not the amount of raw magical energy you have, across all of the sentient species the average for each is very similar. There is little variance between the average raw magic of a Vascari fae newborn and a mortal human newborn. Some individuals have more than others, but not a lot more. And those with truly massive reserves are extraordinarily rare. More so than the history books would have us believe. And those with such large reserves usually have extreme deficiencies that make such power a poor trade off indeed. Aesculapius, the great healer, may have been born with the most powerful healing ability of all time, yet he was also born deaf in one ear and blind in one eye and completely magically incapable of any offensive magics.

Power is what you do to train and use the magic that you have. It is also a thing of the mind. We have one fae elder today who can do almost no magic at all, yet she wields a power completely out of proportion to her magic. She does that because of her wisdom and extremely well crafted usage of what she does have. She doesn't have much, but she can pull a hair off your head from thousands of kilometers away with little effort.

Building yourself into someone capable of great things does not necessitate enormous magical reserves. All you really need is the good judgment to know your strengths and work around your weakness, and will power. Determination alone will get you no where if you're not focusing on training in the right areas. Benjamin was warned against any further bloodmagic rituals by several classmates. But he attempted to use determination to overcome his weaknesses. In a field such as…art…that would not have been a problem. In the most dangerous branch of magic it cost him his life."

XX

It was late Friday night and the club was packed. The swirling lights outside and inside was beginning to make Rahkesh's head hurt. As was the heavy beat of the too-loud music the band on the small stage was pounding out. The amount of pheromones in the packed room had already led him to turn off his sense of smell. The air in the club was hot and the fans on the ceiling did little to help. The packed thrashing (aka dancing) bodies on the dance floor were generating enough heat to make everyone sweat. Between the wild movements a few vampires flickered in and out of view, picking through the crowd and choosing the nights meal. Off in the corners others had already found a muggle or two and were feeding discreetly. The local older vampires tended to be an easy-going lot and as long as the rules were all obeyed the younger vampires from Akren could hunt here without being overly worried about being attacked by their elders.

And because the vampires had plenty of prey the other students from Akren didn't have as much to worry about. Though that didn't mean anyone was letting their guard down. Outside the valley meant that you could be killed. However the werewolves were busy holding a party of their own in the hot springs and most of the other students were wise enough to know that if the packs were out in force they had best stay away. And it was mating season for three fae species, they were, as a result, being extremely jumpy and territorial. They had all stayed behind at the school, while the other fae and the mortals had fled for the relative calm of one of the nearby muggle cities.

The pretty grey-eyed blonde sitting on his knee was Kirsten, a muggle who he met here occasionally. She wasn't too keen on the music or lights here either, but her friends liked it and it was an excellent place to meet. No one from Akren would be trying to kill him in a place this crowded, and since it was filled with muggles the magical ones stood out as if they had neon arrows pointing at them. He didn't know if he still had assassins after him, but if there were they'd be magical, not muggle.

Ever since enrolling in Akren Rahkesh had worked hard at detecting other magical beings, and he'd gotten very good at it, which was why he sensed Fengyang immediately when the lion fae stepped into the club. Rahkesh ducked behind Kirsten's shoulder and watched while Fengyang sniffed at the air. Definitely searching for someone, and Rahkesh was pretty sure that was him.

"Hey..ahh…that's my sister's boyfriend over there, excuse me." Rahkesh said, shooing Kirsten away and adding in a light memory spell to blurr whatever she might remember. Another reason muggles were so nice, no mental defenses. Fengyang turned slowly, smelling the air, found Rahkesh, and started moving his way. Rahkesh relaxed against the wall, waiting while Fengyang picked away between the moving bodies on the dance floor. Keeping a relaxed and calm appearance he quickly went over what weapons he had with him, taser, two knives, three throwing stars, two vials of acids, a bottle containing a mist spell, and another bottle with a gas in it that caused temporary excruciating blindness.

As Fengyang approached Rahkesh turned his back to the lion fae and headed for one of the small plastic tables off in the corners. He really rather hoped Fengyang would not be inclined to attack him, but if he did there was a back door a few paces away from the table he'd selected. And there was no way he was having this discussion standing face to face. Fengyang was taller than him and probably physically stronger, though Rahkesh might be able to beat him in a magical fight.

"I assume you are Rahkesh?' Fengyang asked, sliding into the rickety plastic seat across from Rahkesh. He was wearing gray faded denim and a dark silk T-shirt. There were notice-me-not charms on his hair, probably to avoid questions from the muggles about the long, thick, dark gold/red fur that covered his head and the sides of his neck. For all the odd hair the lion fae was a handsome fellow, in a gruff and rather rumpled sort of way. Interestingly he appeared to be carrying only two knives strapped to his calves and hidden under his jeans and battered combat boots, and no other weapons. Rahkesh had rarely seen anyone from Akren so unarmed. But maybe he didn't need too, his deep rumbling voice sounded like he had some extensive voice magics of some sort. "I have noticed my lionesses seem to have taken an interest in you." He said flatly.

"Then I'm assuming you're the fellow responsible for those pesky sluts who've been following me around for most of the week." Rahkesh replied cheerfully, in opposite to Fengyang's hostile glaring. The big lion fae blinked hard twice, and raised one thick eyebrow.

"Yes. You could say that. Should I take that to mean you do not appreciate the attention?" He asked, sounding just a bit confused. Rahkesh rolled his eyes.

"Pal I can't even walk down to breakfast without being assaulted by those three. And I have to tell you, lion fae breath stinks. Too much rotted meat." Rahkesh said with a huff. Chenzira had pushed him against the all and bitten his tongue the day before. Fengyang stared at him like he'd started sprouting extra limbs, then threw back his head and laughed. Well a lion's version of a laugh that sounded more like a roar and a bark combined. Rahkesh winced as half the club turned to stare at them. From the corner of his eye he saw Kirsten leaving through the front door and sighed unhappily, apparently she wasn't about to wait around, there went his evening. It was several minutes before Fengyang got himself back under control.

"I've never heard anyone _complain_ about the three of them!" he said, still chuckling.

"Yeah well I don't need to be dealing with it, and I've already told them to get lost a few times. Any chance you could rein them in a little?"

"Unlikely." Fengyang said. "I'll give it a try of course, though all my warnings this past week seem to have done nothing. In case you hadn't noticed there're three of them. And they're…ahh…very playful, and unusually powerful. Trying to keep track of one or two is enough to drive anyone crazy."

"Then how did you wind up with them?" Rahkesh asked curiously. Fengyang eyed him for a minute then shrugged.

"Last year my brother and I killed the old lion who had been leading that pride for twenty-eight years. My older brother has the five other lionesses; I wound up with these three. The other four didn't accept us and went off on their own. Last I heard they'd started another pride of their own. And when I say "I wound up with these three" I mean they chose me, not the other way around." Fengyang said glumly. "Sure they're great most of the time, sex drives like succubuses, but they are outrageous flirts."

"Might want to be careful then," Rahkesh advised, trying to not to laugh at Fengyang's predicament, "I know Daray's got his eye on them."

"I know that name, the Ateres with a creepy bat?" Fengyang asked sharply.

"Yes. Actually I'm not so sure he's after them anyone, last I heard he was after _you_. Just a warning." Rahkesh said cheerfully, seeing Daray, Silas and Ally at the door to the club. "But I'm sure he wouldn't object to all four of you." He got up, clapped Fengyang on the shoulder, and went off to meet his friends. It was only fair to let Fengyang know he had a vampire after his ass. Fengyang just stared after him, looking absolutely horrified. Daray smirked at Fengyang, winked, and licked his fangs as they left.

"That was mean. Leave the poor fellow alone." Rahkesh told him.

"But he's so _nice_." Daray said. "Such a beautiful ass." Silas rolled his eyes around and cuffed his cousin across the head.

"Slut."

"I am not."

"Are." Ally agreed with Silas, "Anything more than a half-dozen partners a week counts."

"I'm a vampire."

"So am I." Silas replied, "I have haven't fought, then fucked, half the school."

"What is this?" Rianae asked, appearing beside them, apparently finished with her night's hunting. It was a warm night and there were a lot of muggles out. And it seemed like two thirds of the vampires at Akren were out hunting.

"Explaining to my cousin why he's a slut." Silas replied. "Especially since he's decided he's going to find away to seduce that lion fae."

"Not if I get him first." Rianae replied cheerfully.

Ally, Silas and Rahkesh traded looks and dropped back to let the two fight it out on their own. It just wasn't worth interfering sometimes.

XX

Rahkesh was stumped, well and truly stumped. He could think up a dozen clever tricks for invading whatever fortress Voldemort might currently be in, building a battlefield for their final fight, or even destabilizing or remaking several European nations, all badly in need of both. But he could not think up a way to capture and hold and dementor.

He could jump into a new school with a radically Darwinian culture, coming from one of the softest nations on the planet, and not only survive, but fight and work his way into a secure position well respected by his classmates. He knew half a hundred tricks and strategies for combating an opponent and making their life hell, mostly learned from the Chachapoyaro…but catching a dementor was beyond him.

Sygra nosed open the hinged door to her cage, which was really a cage to keep her mice in, and temperature controlled for her preferences. She slithered across the top and over his bed, then coiled and hurled herself off the bed like a bouncing spring to land on his arm, draped over the railing in front of the doors to his balcony.

_No new ideas?_

_No. You?_

_None. Are you certain you need one of the soul-drinkers?_

_Yes. I don't think I've ever been at this much of a loss before. I need to destroy all the horcruxes before I go to get rid of the one in me and kill Voldemort, but I'm positive that I need a dementor for the locket. _

_You do in fact have a plan for you and Voldemort?_

_Sort of. _

_Ah. _Sygra twisted her head around to look him in the eye. She sounded rather disbelieving.

_I'm not going to just throw my life away Sygra. Too much to do. And I couldn't just leave you could I?_

_No you could not. I would be most displeased_. His familiar told him firmly. _Why not ask the vampires to kill him? _

_Because it's my soul that needs to be separated from his, therefore I have to guide the magic. Though I have had offers to help get him to the location._

_Why a soul-drinker for the locket?_ Sygra asked bringing the conversation back to the problem at hand.

_Because the damn thing has a soul binding on it and a soul-pull that's directed at Voldemort to keep the soul stationary once inside. I tested it against the soul-pull detectors Xanthius has. He uses them to detect select magical magnifying pieces for his students. Like a specific unicorn's tail hair for making a new wand will have a connection that can be felt at a soul-deep level when properly prepared. A dementor can counter the soul-pull better than any other spell or magic can. The binding can be broken by my holding another piece of his soul. _

_Ssssss. You do have a problem. Why not one of the vortex inducing broken runes to open the locket and remove Voldemort's soul? And a dead summoning to knock out a soul-drinker?_

Rahkesh almost laughed, Sygra was one very well educated snake. Even if she didn't quite understand all of it.

_I'll have to discuss that with Namach, he might not appreciate me ripping the inner walls off one of the bloodmagic chambers. _Wrapping Sygra securely around his neck he went to find the ancient.

Namach's rooms were closed so Rahkesh headed for the hallways full of bloodmagic chambers. Reaching ahead with his mind he sensed the intense not-alive darkness the ancient vampire gave off. Rounding a corner Namach's broad shouldered red robed form came into view outside one of the chambers observing another student performing a ritual. Rahkesh approached slowly until the vampire gave some sign of knowing he was there, a brief turn of the head towards him, Rahkesh went over to see who was attempting what.

It was Mara, Rahkesh didn't know her very well, but he had met her the day they had arrived at Akren. A cheerful young woman with short brown hair and bright hazel eyes "perky" could describe Mara very well. She was working on healing magic mostly, with apparently some bloodmagic thrown in. Rahkesh had had only one occasion to really talk with her since arriving, they had no classes in common, and that had been when another of their year-mates, a vampire, had managed to accidentally decapitate himself doing threadmagic. Mara had been on hand and had refused to even try to help him. He apparently had not been someone she'd cared to have "living in the same world with me".

"Do not tell me you are doing _another_ ritual." Namach said as Rahkesh studied Mara. She had two knives, working one on each side, and was slicing a light set of cuts, barely scratches, into interlocking half-moons just above her navel.

"No. I'm attempting to destroy another horcrux. This time he got clever. It's _inside_ a locket that has an ancient soul-binding spell on it, plus a soul-pull enchantment Voldemort did." Rahkesh said, not mentioning anything about the examinations he'd been doing of his bloodmagic. He was still unsure of what was happening.

"Is the old magic compatible with his?"

"Yes. Unfortunately. It was done by an ancestor of his, for precisely the purpose of attaching to someone of that bloodline."

"Hmm. Well that's not good." Namach said. Unhelpfully. "What did you have in mind?"

"A soul-drawing vortex, involving a dementor and a vampire. I've got the vampire, but the dementor is proving to be difficult."

"Hadrian had a few hundred extra ones lying around. He must have been pleased." Namach chuckled. "His magic will not be a problem?"

"How did you know I'd chosen a magical one?" Rahkesh asked curiously.

"Because he needs to feed the vortex his soul. Can't do that with a muggle vampire. They can't even do the most basic bloodmagic, couldn't ever sustain a vortex. And Hadrian has a ready supply of spare vampires handy. He'll already have killed any muggle ones, the few left are the best tasting and he wouldn't give them up. How do you plan to get a dementor?"

"No idea. Perhaps a dead summoning." Rahkesh said. A dead summoning would make a dementor think it was feeding on a living soul, until it realized it had the soul of a dead person, at which point the vomit reflex to reject it before being seriously harmed would knock it out, or at least make it vulnerable. Dementors could keep the souls of those who died during the souls' removal, or the souls of bodies that had died after. But they could not absorb a soul whose body had been dead for a long time. A "dead summoning" summoned a bit of the same energy that comprised souls, but did not bring an actual soul. It was the only form of a failed summoning that didn't kill the person doing it.

"Too complex. Keep it simple." Namach said. "What you need to do is to capture a dementor, not kill it in combat. Precise well-used magic can contain a dementor. Why not a full containment spell? Chain it to the floor and get the dementor inside. Granted containment magics are best done with threadmagic which is basically impossible for you, but there are other ways. Use them."

"Hmm, I'll have to talk to the goblins about getting the right stone." Rahkesh said, "but I doubt the various Gringotts branches in the plagued countries have anything better to do." The goblins had closed everything, and no one would go into a crowded place like a bank these days anyway. They were too busy dying.

"You had best leave that for later. We are going to Mexico in four days, noon." Namach said. The date and time for destroying the Mexican portal had been set that morning by the City Masters involved.

XX

Light crackled and flared, moving in whips, spears, and nets of sparkling clashing electricity. The bright flashes only enhanced the darkness, the lights disappearing immediately, sucked into the nothingness around them. The bursts didn't radiate, existing only a sharp pricks of light that vanished immediately. Drawn in by the darkness and swallowed into the thick endless black.

Dancing spirals of lightning swirled outwards around him, dragging magic along their spidery lines, every sharp flare spiked bright pain through his body. He wasn't breathing, Rahkesh drew a deep breath, and the darkness receded. A powerful magnetic tug was dragging him backwards even as the lightning zipped away into the dark.

It was silent in the dark, a thick suffocating silence, so thick he could almost feel it. Cloaking every thought and movement until his limbs felt numb, but relaxed. The silent, breathless dark brought a loss of feeling, yet there was a flying disembodied freedom in the darkness. It was like drowning, without water. He was drowning. His heart wasn't beating. Rahkesh breathed again, hovering.

Then the thunderbird called. The shocking war cry pierced through the dark like razor whip through softened butter. It was a brilliant beacon of sound in the silence. The great wings unfurled around him, feathers of lightning sparkling along his skin, bringing immense agony, immense joy , immense power, immense freedom. The wind flew around him, the feeling returned in the wind, burning and whipping around him, his every nerve lighting up. The lightning flared, the light grew stronger. Feathers washed his skin, the thunderstorms flickering inside every one felt like gentle touches, like water lapping at his skin. Now massive forked bolts joined the fray, leaping away from him and then back, wrapping around him, through him. The thunderbird beat its wings.

And Rahkesh felt his heart start beating again, and immediate surge of such immense pain that he screamed. It was followed just as fast by an enormous surge of free-flying joy and life. Lightning was now tearing at him, rippling across his body, no longer flying away, not leaping then coming back, now it was contained entirely within. The terrible bolts bouncing around through his body and mind. His mind returned to his body.

Rahkesh felt like a gauzy curtain was being lifted from his mind. He could see, but couldn't act. It was a dream-like state, nothing was real, but he could feel just fine. He felt like an observer in his own body as he turned around and sat down cross legged. Abruptly the observer feeling vanished and he was seated cross-legged on the floor. Rahkesh gasped in sharply as his mind cleared.

Nuri thumped his tail on the matted floor and huffed at Silas. Silas blinked twice, his eyes, which had blurred and widened, went back to their normal state.

"Well I have to admit this is the first time _I've _ever encountered shared mind magics." Professor Masamba told Silas and Nuri. The big panther purred and rubbed his head against Silas leg. Silas scratched under his chin and grinned tiredly.

Rahkesh touched his temples, then his eyes, with shaky hands. The thunderbird was silent, the basilisk hissing around him, coiling around his senses in shifting scales. He remembered where he was, what he was doing. Silas and Nuri had needed a test subject for their hypnosis training with Masamba, Rahkesh had volunteered.

In retrospect it hadn't been such a great idea. He'd done it to see if he could keep control of his magics while his mind was being controlled. He hadn't. To say the reaction had been spectacular would be like calling a star going nova boring to witness. That was why he was in a heavily fortified room in the school's basement. It was a square stone block, hollowed out, and surrounded by a thick jelly-like substance that filled the entire cavern, thick enough that the stone block he was it could sit in the middle without sinking. The jelly-stuff was so that shocks wouldn't cause earthquakes. The walls were coated with pale blue enchanted paint so he could see into the room Silas, Nuri, and Masamba were in, and they could see him. The connection had also allowed for one way magical transfer.

The walls of Rahkesh's room were scorched black, the stone melted into glass, the matted floor turned to ash. The magical backlash had been bad enough to make his eyes bleed as his magic tore themselves apart fighting against the mental invasion. His whole body was shaking and his bloodmagic runes were bleeding, coating him in a film of blood. His head ached and his animagi were hissing and screaming.

However, despite his reaction, he had allowed the experiment to continue. Rahkesh had wanted to see if, given the time to try, he could reign in his extreme reactions. He had, after nearly an hour he had managed to calm the lightning storm, stop the bleeding of his runes and eyes, and pull his magics back. It wasn't something he ever intended to do again, and he was sure that his subconscious reactions, more violent than the conscious ones, would still continue. But it was reassuring for Rahkesh to know he could stop himself if needed.

"So it is transferable then?" Silas asked Masamba. The tiger fae nodded his striped dark gray and black furred head. His tiger form must look like a giant silver tabby, Rahkesh decided. His gold eyes glinted sharply and his elongated teeth were visible when he smiled.

"Yes. Nuri can call on your magics and you his, but only the mind magic."

"How do you feel Rahkesh?" Silas asked.

"Relieved. And like I spent a half hour under a cruciatus curse." Rahkesh said, flopping onto his back. Silas and Nuri had taken turns making him walk around the room, Nuri in clockwise circles, Silas in counter-clockwise.

"The more interesting point is that you no longer need eye contact to get control." Masamba told Silas and Nuri. "Both of you can take control of someone without the eyes contact part. Now part of that is altering perceptions, you pressure the mind into thinking its safe, natural relaxation. Even if the subject knows what's going to happen, their mind still lets it guard down. Your ability seems to naturally work not by brute force, but more like building a spider's web of silk and gently coaxing the mind into the sticky part."

"Grandmother will be pleased." Daray said. He was in the room with Silas. "Think you can get out of there?" he asked Rahkesh. Rahkesh's headache had faded some. He stood, wobbling and moved towards the panel on the wall that would move the block to the side of the chamber of goo and let him access the connecting movable hallway to the rest of the school.

"That may be a problem." Namach said. The ancient had been observing Rahkesh to see how his bloodmagic reacted. "It appears you've broken all the wards on that room. Dissolved them away. The magic you were giving off was intense enough to solidify that pseudo-jello. I just ran the test, whatever you created Rahkesh, it's harder than steel."

"I thought the wards were unbreakable and that gloop unalterable."

"That's what everyone thought. Never been done by a student before anyway. Akren's founder created that goo stuff, has never altered itself in a thousand years." Namach sounded _very _amused. "Nicely done."

Rahkesh leaned against the wall laughing, every breath and chuckle extremely painful. A magical backlash of the sort he'd just produced flared through every cell in the entire body. Normally magic didn't do that, and it didn't travel through the body. But for such large amounts cells turned into conducting rods. His nerves hijacked by his magic to channel it outwards. He'd never hurt so bad in his life. Tears were running down his face and he wasn't sure if they were from hysteria or pain.

"I didn't feel any earthquakes." Masamba said.

"Look out the window." Silas said softly, staring outside wide-eyed. The room he and the other occupied had floor to ceiling windows. The others turned to look.

It was high noon. And dark as midnight. The sky black with clouds so thick that no light got through. The black mass covered the entire valley, with no end in sight. High above flashes of lightning, so thick and concentrated that they rippled through the black clouds like nets rather than bolts, leaped between layers of black clouds. The professors went to the window, staring outside at the amazing sight. The light vanished into the darkness like it was being sucked into a black hole. So intense was the black pull that they couldn't see any layers of clouds, just the blackness and flashes of lightning.

"I've never seen anything like that." Masamba whispered. "I can feel it so strongly, it's like purified death."

"No one has seen anything like that before. At least not in the last few centuries." Namach said softly. "He created a death cloud of some sort." He spun and walked to a panel of magical sensors that had been recording what was happening to Rahkesh.

"I think I died." Rahkesh whispered.

"Just about." Namach said, looking at the records. "You were hovering in between, and giving off enough power to mix life and death across a broad area. Channeled it through your body, created a rift."

"Bad?"

"No. It will solve itself. The magical shift still exists. I can send everything back where it belongs."

"I didn't think I had that much power."

"You don't. It's not the brute force of the power. It's the connection and the use. You worked this like a child trying to paint a rainbow. The colors are in the right order but overlap a little. The finer the work the less power needed."

"It wasn't intentional."

"I should hope not." Namach sighed. "I'll teleport you out of there."

Rahkesh was instantly standing in the room with the others. Without the wall to hold him up he collapsed to the floor in a heap.

"My mind must have overreacted as usual, sent me into death to get away."

"No wonder I have such a headache." Silas muttered. His bloodmagic runes were also bleeding. "Good thing I was drawing on Nuri and he wasn't helping directly. That might have killed him."

"Being a vampire Silas has some resistance and his own death connection to stabilize things." Namach agreed. "Once the connection was open he was also partly dead, Nuri was alive and negated most of the effects. I think, Rahkesh, you followed his connection when your minds crossed. And then you pulled on your own to guide the power funneling to continue it. Your thunderbird took the wards apart instinctively by picking off the threads connecting them then dissolving the layers simultaneously."

"Uh huh." Rahkesh said, dragging himself to a sitting position. His hearing and vision faded, and then returned.

"Well a little practice won't hurt your necromancy attempts any." Namach said finally. The black mass was shrinking away and light was returning. The ancient vampire showed no obvious effort, but his skin was covered in faintly glowing spidery bloodmagic runes.

"Hmmm…" Rahkesh responded, and fainted away.

"Leave him." Namach said when Daray went to catch him. "He's skin's too sensitive to be touched. His heart stopped, the only reason he's alive is that his magic kept his blood circulating and drew oxygen into his blood directly through his skin and the walls of his veins. He'll be out for a few days."

"So, Silas, you may tell your grandmother that you can also work in conjunction with a functioning necromancer across death." Masamba told Silas.

"However, you are not going to try that again until you finish a few rituals I have in mind and practice a lot more." Namach said sharply.

"So can he generate those death clouds at any time?" Daray asked, nodding to Rahkesh.

"No. Silas pushed that about with his mind control. The death cloud was the thunderbird trying to kill the one killing it. It would not have happened at all…but Xanthius and I have a death magic experiment operating upstairs." Namach said, jerking his head upwards. "It's with Amadan magic. One of the students wanted to try a summoning while simultaneously using their curse. Rahkesh has some experience with that curse."

"That is reassuring." Masamba said.

"Yes. Generating those intentionally injures the soul directly. Rahkesh may have a strong connection to life but not enough for that. He's got a long way to go in bloodmagic before that would be possible without permanent damage." Namach said. "Silas keep a healer's guide spell on Nuri to see if he starts having trouble with his heart or magic. And no feeding for you for twenty-four hours. Also, don't sleep. That should give your magic time to put back bits that got lost along the death connection. Daray, make sure they both get back to their rooms." Namach ordered. Daray nodded and stood, levitating Rahkesh. Nuri and Silas followed them out of the room.

"So. That goo-stuff." Masamba said after the door shut.

"We'll get Strawlime on it." Namach said. "It has actually changed once before. Strawlime did that so I assume he has some idea of what it is."

"The records say it had never changed."

"It wasn't the sort of experiment that generates good publicity." Namach said slowly. "If you want to know more ask the headmistress."

"Dying is an extreme reaction to a mental connection." Masamba stated, changing the subject, since if it wasn't in the private records available only to alumni then Nvara wouldn't say anything to him.

"Rahkesh has the single worst phobia of mental connections I've ever encountered." Namach agreed. "However he only reacts like that when he doesn't have enough control over it. Invading his mind will kill him and start a magic-consuming destructive chain reaction aimed at removing the person responsible."

"A fear that intense?"

"Yes."

"I wonder what his bogarts do?" Masamba wondered aloud, and was surprised when Namach laughed.

"They turn into dementors of course. Excuse me Masamba." Namach said, leaving for his office. Rahkesh needed a dementor didn't he? And the presence of one feeding dementor called others didn't it?

XX

"Evening Luna." Rahkesh said. Luna pulled her wand from behind her ear and unlocked the magical door charm. She waved him in the door of her new home. Since leaving Britain her family had moved around a lot. Her father had finally reestablished his paper printing headquarters in Seattle (United States).

"Oh hello Harry. It's good to see you. Hermione, Neville and Ginny are here, did you know Hermione still believes that Crumple-horned Snorkacks do not exist?" Luna said. Her pale eyes inviting him to share her incredulity at this impossibility. She was not, Harry noticed, wearing the radish earrings, having exchanged them for tiny bits of red coral. The necklace was the same as ever. Oh well, the earrings at least were much nicer.

"Really?" Harry asked. "Perhaps I should try to find a picture for her."

"It's impossible to photograph a crumple-horned snorkack Harry." Luna said gently, as if speaking to small child.

"I didn't know that. How odd." Harry said, Luna nodded gently and pulled him into the living room where Hermione, Ginny and Neville were waiting. They all turned to look at him silently.

"Hi ya Nev." Harry said, and everyone immediately relaxed. "How have you been?"

"Great. I've got an internship at the National Institute of Herbology, Arctic Plants Division." Neville said enthusiastically.

"Wow. Congrats." Harry said, unsurprised. Any good herbologist couldn't fail to note Neville's talent. "Are you still seeing the healers?" He asked, knowing the Neville's injuries had healed but that the healers had been calling him back in periodically.

"Nope. Good as new." Neville said.

"He has a very nice scar." Luna said cheerfully. Harry raised an eyebrow at Neville, who turned a bit pink. Behind his back Ginny hid a smile and gestured between Neville and Luna. Harry took a seat on the couch beside Hermione and one of the cups of tea on the coffee table.

"I told them what happened to Ron." Hermione said apologetically, ending the happy greetings. Harry nodded that it was okay.

"I have no idea why he didn't use the luck potion." Harry said softly. Not that he regretted Ron's death in the slightest. He was, in fact, very much relieved, but it would be bets to act sympathetic and at least a bit disturbed.

"Probably didn't have time, or didn't think of it. He never was too quick." Ginny said with a shrug. If anything she missed her brother less than anyone else. "A demon summoning by death eaters, I never really thought Voldemort was that stupid."

"I don't think anyone did. He's summoned others, most of which were killed, and some of which are still MIA. Those ones seemed to obey him. It does seem odd he never guessed that they might be acting loyal to get him to summon more who could then begin their attack on Earth." Harry said.

"Maybe he just got desperate." Neville said, "I read all about the battle between him and vampires in the papers. Sounded like he got hit pretty bad."

"He did. Very bad. Lost over half his force. And many more died later of injuries and slow-acting curses. However, he did get more than a dozen vampires, though four were apprentices." Rahkesh was not going to give them all the details, but the only City Master who had died had been killed by loosing his concentration in commanding one of the fire tornadoes the vampires had summoned. The others had all been bearable losses, vacancies quickly filled by other vampires. An upset that so many had been lost, but no real harm to the vampire ranks. "Voldemort could have waited and slowly rebuilt. Why rush when the vampires are at war with each other and the werewolves being pushed out? He could have waited then picked up the pieces." Harry said.

"He might not have had the time. I looked up some dark rituals like what he did to come back. They aren't particularly stable. It could be he doesn't have much longer to live. Or he needs to get control before solidifying the rituals effects." Hermione said. Harry had not considered that Voldemort might not be…working correctly…that his new body wasn't holding up. It was something he would have to mention to Moody and Shacklebolt. Why hadn't anyone else thought of that before now?

"Tonks and auror Shacklebolt got out the same day Hermione did." Harry told everyone. "Alastor Moody is in Spain with Remus. Remus is working with some werewolf packs there, though last I heard he hadn't joined any."

"That is good to hear. It's about time Remus got out of Britain." Hermione said.

"The remnants of the several London werewolf packs are all in Spain, restarting with relatives. When the plague hit and they learned that werewolves were susceptible they took off until it runs its course."

"I've been following the death toll, it sounds awful." Ginny said with a shiver.

"Corpses lying the streets, houses filled with bodies. I can't even image how it must smell." Neville said softly.

Rahkesh could well image how it smelled. He knew that smell as well as he knew his own face in the mirror. He'd recognize it anywhere for the rest of his life. The healing rooms filled with death and black vomit, the rotting bodies turned gray and, over time, a bit liquid if not disposed of correctly. The scent of decay so thick in the air you could actually taste it and it made your tongue ache. He didn't ever want to encounter any of that ever again, but he probably would. He'd had more than a few dreams these past days that had sent him out of bed vomiting late at night, remembering. From the shadows in Daray and Silas eyes they too were experiencing some disturbing memories.

"Thoroughly horrible." Harry said, wrinkling his nose. "The muggle papers have caught on to it. They've found a few homes of magic folk with the whole family dead in the house. They have no idea what's happening, and I don't think anyone has informed them."

"What?" Ginny asked, "informed them?"

"There's a special means of communication so that the higher-ups can know what's happening in the magical community. There are only a handful who know we exist, but there are some." Hermione explained. "I doubt there's enough of a government left to even think of it."

"I'll ask Shacklebolt. We can notify the City Master of London and have him send someone over to explain." Harry said. Hadrian might well have his own communication methods; he'd been running London's vampire community for centuries. "The vampires can move around freely now, especially since there's no one left to stop them, so they can get in touch easily enough."

Two hours later Rahkesh left Luna's house with a grateful sigh. As much as he liked occasionally seeing his old friends he didn't feel entirely comfortable with them anymore, probably never would. They were just acquaintances now, and any prolonged encounter got strained.

He followed the magic the oozed through the city to the magical sector, slipping past the wards at a set of bus stops and appearing at a flying carpet stop with witches and wizards moving around. Beautiful old buildings stretched away, filled with small shops. It was a warm evening and there were a lot of people about, of a variety of species. He could spot three varieties of fae, werewolves, vampires, and mortal humans from where he stood. There didn't seem to be the slightest tension between the species. Well except for some odd looks at the two centaurs eating salads on the balcony of a fancy restaurant.

This was the nicer part of town; Rahkesh was looking for the other side. A quick search of the magics around led him to a cobblestone side street shaded by taller buildings of both sides. At the end of it a wider street branched away in three directions. There was plenty of life here too, and a good deal of dark magic and not-so-nice intentions. The populace of the third street seemed to be composed entirely of prostitutes and the other two housed a variety of stores, most of which were not entirely honest-looking.

Ally had recommended a place on the middle street that sold a variety of fascinating objects picked up all over the world, most of which bore curses and enchantments that had been illegal for some time. Why it had never been closed by the authorities was anyone's guess. Ally's brother worked law enforcement and he certainly knew about it, but the owner was harmless and the owner had never been caught importing, or in the act of buying or selling anything remotely illegal, though he did own stuff. How he managed to run a business of illegal objects without ever being caught buying or selling anything illegal was a good question many people would give a lot to know.

Rahkesh was looking for some slivers of Heartsfail wood. A tree creating by an assassin herbologist several millennia earlier and illegal everywhere in the world. The tree was harmless enough, passing for a silver birch at a glance. But it was not fully alive, operating a bit like a thestral. Only those who had seen death could see it, and only those who had seen death could be killed by it. Splinters of the wood, once they got into the skin, made their way through the body to the heart, piercing it and killing the victim. Rahkesh was hoping it would work as well on demons as it did on all other species.

Cyala had announced that the City Masters in Central America were ready to open the caverns where the portals were located. The delay to this point had been caused some difficulty obtaining "supplies", namely several bombs containing several thousand Cornish Pixies.

Normal Cornish Pixies were extremely pesky creatures. When an Akren alumnus had volunteered them for use during the raid on the British Ministry of Magic the Ateres present had reported it to Cyala, who had located the owner and purchased as many as she could get.

The ones in the bombs were packed in tightly, asleep, and heavily enchanted. Aggression potions had been added to their food for days and they would wake utterly ferocious. Rahkesh had volunteered to find something for them to use. The bomb would be dropped through the portal into the demon world, then the portal would be swung through itself to create a portal in the opposite direction, then it would collapsed and implode.

During the switch from outgoing in incoming, and before it self-destructed, there would be exactly five minutes when it would be open both ways. Here Rahkesh would summon Sharahak. It was during this period when they risked having demons come through to attack. The caverns would be sealed around them, and with most of the Ateres present, plus Namach, plus some hundred fighters the Master of Mexico City was supplying, they should be fine, but there was some risk. Hence the bomb and pixies.

It would take a few mass memory charms to let the ultra-aggressive pixies know what the slivers of wood did, but once they did they would be in the demon realm, armed with Heartsfail splinters. If the splinters did indeed work on demons it would just be a matter of getting the splinters under the edge of a scale or between the neck guard hairs, or in their noses and ears, and the demons would be dropping like flies.

Rahkesh had done a lot of things since entering Akren that he'd never thought he'd ever do, but arming several thousand drugged Cornish Pixies with Heartsfail slivers was just about the most amazing.

The shop owner was a half-brother of Matthew Fleming, to whom Rahkesh sold rare potions ingredients in Ottawa. Rahkesh had gone a spoken to his business partner before coming; Matthew had told him all about his younger brother.

Jeris Fleming was a paranoid anarchist with mild Asperger's, and heliophobia (fear of sunlight) he was also a bit of a genius and the darling of the family. Rahkesh carried a note from Matthew for his brother, since that was probably the only way he would be able to convince Jeris to even admit to selling Heartsfail and actually sell it to him in less than a month. Jeris was one of two suppliers on the North American continent, and there were none at all in Europe or Africa. Ally's brother, being in law enforcement, civilian protection, knew about the situation developing in the Mexican caverns as a security matter. Being practical he hadn't said anything to his employers when the plan to use an illegal substance was discussed. He'd even gone so far as to tell Rahkesh that he'd best go to one of the North American dealers. Rahkesh didn't speak any Asian languages and the two providers in Australia were both under investigation for smuggling the stuff.

There was no sign on the shop, just some very elaborate gold scrawls over the front windows, which were enormous, arched, and displayed several human skulls, an array of eyeballs, and the most ornate amazing silver and ruby headdress Rahkesh had ever seen. There was no door – Jeris didn't like them. Instead the entrance was hung with what appeared to be beads but were in fact dried sea fairy eggs. Upon being immersed in saltwater the sea fairies would hatch, develop wings, and take flight.

Inside the building was spotlessly clean and impeccably neat. Every object on display had a neat label and price. Everything was illuminated by White-fairy Butterfly cocoons and the ceiling crawled with Guardian vines in a scene so reminiscent of the Akren conference halls housed in Mt. Cerberus that Rahkesh paused in the doorway, almost thinking he'd been transported to one. The Akren signal hit him seconds later. Jeris kept his low, very low, but Rahkesh had let his own out. Jeris responded then his signal vanished completely.

The sunlight did not penetrate the windows, and stopped at the doorframe so abruptly that it could only have been done with magic. Jeris was heliophobic. Rahkesh looked around and abruptly found Jeris directly in front of him, inches out of the sunlight.

He was small and rail-thin with sparse scraggly hair that had once been blonde and was now gray. Beady hazel eyes peered out a movie-star handsome face that seemed completely out of place with his hair and half-missing left ear. Jeris blinked only occasionally, watching his guest expressionlessly.

"Evening sir, Rahkesh." Rahkesh said shaking Jeris hand and stepping inside so that Jeris's hand wasn't in the sunlight.

"Rahkesh. Interesting choice. Not your original, but then few of Akren's use their own names." Jeris said, he had a surprisingly soft melodic voice.

"No." Rahkesh agreed to Jeris statement. He moved over to one of the shelves, eyeing a display of hollow emeralds holding mummified fairies inside them. "I am looking for a very specific product Mr. Fleming, your brother recommended you."

Jeris blinked at that, finally. He held out his hand and Rahkesh gave him the letter. Jeris read at an astonishing speed, finishing it in seconds. He nodded and moved away to a low counter in the back.

"I do have the highest quality cocoons on the continent." He agreed. "How many?"

"I'm hoping to light the entire manor." Rahkesh explained, following the lie in the letter about buying White-fairy Butterfly cocoons. "Six thousand would do." The letter contained a code saying what the actual product was. Matthew Fleming had shown him the code so that in the future he would know how to contact Jeris.

Jeris turned to stare at him incredulously. Six thousand Heartsfail slivers was a lot. More than had been sold worldwide that decade.

"I like to know how well my cocoons perform; most people don't bother to tell me if they were satisfactory. For such a larger order would you be willing to review them?" Jeris asked. Rahkesh translated that as meaning he wanted to know what they were for at some point.

"I could write a response, probably not immediately but I would be happy to help." He agreed after a moment's consideration. Information had its own value and if he was getting so many slivers there had to be an incredible reason. Letting Jeris in on the use would bring down the price. That would be nice, especially since Rahkesh was buying both the Heartsfail and the cocoons they came inside.

"How soon?"

"Day after tomorrow would be best, if not then the day after that." Rahkesh said. Jeris stared long and hard at him and shook his head.

"Impossible."

"Is there anyone you know who could supply them?" Rahkesh asked.

"No." Jeris replied with a graceful shrug. Rahkesh stopped himself from grinning. They had a deal. Where Jeris was going to get six thousand splinters of Heartsfail he had no idea. But Jeris selling method was to deny the ability to do business, and left no room for any questions.

XX

Rahkesh picked up the massive bundles of White-fairy Butterfly cocoons and put them into the trunk Cyala had provided. It was the size of both his boots, but the six thousand cocoons fit easily, vanishing inside. He sensed the sudden appearance of another being in the room, paused long enough to blink and recognize the magic of one messed up sick demon-vampire, and closed the trunk.

Daray was lazily draped over his couch, in demon form. The edges of his scales were peeling and the once shiny black scales looked tarnished, scratched and chipped.

"You look awful."

"Probably about as bad as I feel." Daray replied.

"We're brining Cornish Pixies, best keep your mouth shut." Rahkesh said, and watched Daray wince.

"I'm not going to go snapping them up, no matter how tempting." Daray said. His allergy to them might kill him at this point.

Rahkesh glanced over at the demon with concern. Daray hadn't made a single snappy comment or snarky remark about the pixies. Over the past months, as his condition got worse, Daray had been flipping through mood swings and going form energized to exhausted in seconds. He'd become bizarrely irrational, mixed with occasional bouts of cold logic. Whatever was happening from the demon not being able to complete its metamorphosis had knocked his personality around enough that the being sitting on the couch at that moment was completely different from the Daray that had traveled back in time with Rahkesh the year before.

"We'll have Sharahak back soon. Maybe he'll know a cure for the allergy." Rahkesh said, "sheep urine on the full moon or whatever demons do."

"Sheep." Daray said, turning to stare at him, and then his eyes narrowed. "Sheep. Urine. I hear you know all about sheep, quite intimately. Care to share?"

Rahkesh didn't bother to say anything back; he was relieved that Daray had responded at all. "Come on, Namach said to meet him in his rooms. Is Silas coming?"

"Yes. He'll be arriving with grandmother and the others. The only reason grandmother let me come was because we might need a demon to work the reversal." Daray said, turning to his vampire form and following Rahkesh from his rooms. "And because if any demons try to come through I'll hopefully sense them first." Privately Rahkesh didn't think Daray was in any condition to sense anything in advance, but he didn't say anything. If demons did get through the open portal Daray's own demon would give them a second's startle that could be very useful, and Daray's form _was_ larger and stronger than most of the demons they had on ice in the labs.

Namach was ready to go when they arrived, the ancient vampire wasn't carrying a single weapon, that they could see, but Eli was accompanying them. The magical lizard bellowed at Rahkesh, then at a sharp command from Namach sat down placidly, tongue flickering.

"I'll teleport us there - we're going directly into the caverns. They've already been sealed in case any demons get loose. You're both ready?"

"Yes, let's go." Daray said. Rahkesh handed Namach the trunk – the magics involved in it were too much for him to carry during the transportation. Namach's skin flared briefly with bloodmagic runes. A brief cold feeling frizzled along Rahkesh's spine, and then they were standing in a dimly lit cave. Rahkesh looked around in surprise, he hadn't even felt them move, and wasn't at all off balance. Namach hadn't needed to be touching any of his passengers, or apparently focus much. Namach's precision abilities must have been more intense than Rahkesh had thought; he hadn't felt the slightest shift beneath his feet.

Twisting stalactites of pale yellow and pale green hung like fangs from the ceiling, below them massive stalagmites leaped up from the floor in wavering forms like solid flames. There were splashes of orange and white dripping down the walls, looking like ice that had melted and refrozen. Flakes of white and glitter made the caves shimmer. On the uneven surface of the floor pools of water, undisturbed for thousands of years, lay like miniature lakes surrounded by tiny ridges of quartz and material that had dripped down from the ceiling. The caves smelled cold and wet, despite the warm early fall air outside. Their breath was visible in the air as they walked. Well actually the vampires weren't breathing.

The caverns were entirely too beautiful for the purpose they served. On the unusually even and flat floor of the largest chamber was a gold ring set into the ground. From it gold spikes shot inwards like the spokes of a wheel. At the center was a cylindrical altar. It was a nearly neck-high block of gold. Around the upper lip was a series of small arches of gold, these bore marks that appeared to be from claws, as if some flying creatures had landed on them. The top of the altar was a bowl, half as deep as the altar was tall. Inside it was filled with sharpened needle-like gold spikes as long as Rahkesh's index finger.

The outside of the altar was covered in images of skeletons that appeared to be melting, like some disturbed painting. Each skeleton held various human organs in their hands, hearts, livers, lungs, a kidney, a brain. The skeletons were joined by chains of gold around their wrists and throats. From behind the skull of each skeleton was a pattern like a starburst, with rays leaping out just far enough to touch the rays from the next closest skeletons.

Vampires began appearing in neat ranks, well armed. There were one hundred of them, commanded by a gray-haired female, who was missing the little finger of each hand. They were being fielded by Sergio Cesario, the Master of Mexico City and most of that country. Also in attendance were Sven of Belize and half a hundred of his own vampires.

A moment later the vampire stirred uneasily, and big black forms appeared. The Ateres dark angles. They looked like walked shadows with no defined form. Big black things with blurry edges.

"There are two forms. The visible flaming one, and this, the shadows." Daray said softly to Rahkesh. Silas had also appeared, and taken a position on an out of the way ledge. Daray and Rahkesh joined him while Namach went to talk with Sergio, Eli following closely. The black blurred forms of the dark angles moved, taking up positions behind Cyala along one wall of the cavern. There were twelve of them total. Most of the Ateres were present.

This was going to be a real party.

-

Sorry about the cliffy. I'll try to rush the next chapter.

-

- **Many many thanks to Ahlmal, who has translated the first chapter of A Second Chance at Life into Spanish! Thanks again!**

-

- For those who still can't take all the Euro-bashing – I've got friends there, and penpals. I LIKE Europe, almost all of it. Heck the UK is on my want-to-visit list. Chill. If Harry Potter had come from Brazil all of South America would be a wasteland.

-

- I don't know how often I'll have to say this before people stop bringing it up – NO ROMANCE in this fic. Rahkesh will NOT be paired with anyone long-term. Thanks.

- For all the Sharahak fans out there - he'll be back next chapter.


	12. Chapter 12

RatherFabulous - I also generally find romance to detract from a fic. So I don't include it at all.

Evergreen Sceptre – No, no, yes, yes, not telling, no, more detail later, possibly. I think I got all your questions.

-

Chapter 12

Light shifted in waves across the walls and one of the black shadowy forms detached itself from the Ateres angels along the walls and moved around behind Silas and Daray. Without the usual flames the dark angels were simply big wisps of shadow, too dark to see any features or even any movements. They were a deep black that absorbed light and darkened everything around them so that their forms became amorphous. They glided rather than walked, leaving no sign of their passing and no movements to indicate when their legs were moving. Rahkesh decided this one must be Sabien, Daray's enormous father – it was the largest of group in height and width.

"All right ittle reptile?" Sabien's deep voice came from beside them, confirming Rahkesh's suspicions. It really was rather hard to mistake Sabien for anyone else; he was too tall and too broad, his shoulders wide enough to give Hagrid pause.

"Fine. Nice to see you too, Hulk." Daray said cheekily. Sabien laughed gruffly and ruffled his hair. Daray went stumbling under his father's massive hand. "Dad! You over-sized brute."

Silas and Rahkesh snickered as Daray pulled himself upright again. Sabien had taken to the air and was several meters above circling the ceiling with another of the dark angels.

_This place smells like death_ Sygra hissed into Rahkesh's ear.

_How recent?_

_Sssss. A week, maybe a day or two more. There are more people coming. Live ones. _

_Not vampires?_

_No._ Sygra said. Rahkesh sent a sharp mental jab at Namach with a single word – "visitors." Namach sniffed the air and turned towards a tunnel that led into the room. A second later every vampire in the room turned as a dozen mortals entered. Sergio, Master of Mexico City, began speaking rapidly to them. The leader, a gray-haired man with a tiny mouth and sharp nose snapped back. The woman standing beside him waved their group into an empty space in the circle around the portal.

"They're representatives of the local aurors. An elite team." Silas said, translating. "Here to observe and help if anything goes wrong."

From the direction the aurors had come another group appeared. These were fae, of two species Rahkesh didn't recognize. One group had dark green skin and dark green hair, with almond shaped jungle green eyes, no whites. These must be some sort of forest based species, though he'd never seen anything like them. The others were some sort of animal fae with thick fur in shades of gray over the head and down the back of the neck. Predators of some sort. There were a dozen of each species, four stopped by the entrance they had used and the others went through the crowd to join the aurors and Cyala near the altar. Sergio greeted them in their own language. The apparent leader of the animal fae, a short silver-haired fae with solid blue eyes, replied in fluent Spanish.

"These two species have territories near here. They're looking forward to getting rid of this portal." Silas translated, "can't be easy living with that under your feet."

"That leader is a timber wolf," Daray said, "odd that they're so far south. It must be one of the territories that are removed from this world. I don't recognize the others at all."

"Looks like they can fight though, they've got claws." Rahkesh observed, the green ones had four on each hand.

"The more the better right now. Doesn't mater what species." Daray said, "that portal has had a lot of travelers between worlds and it doesn't look at all damaged. I don't like that."

Daray was right, Rahkesh realized as he turned and examined the portal closer. This portal was a very powerful one. All the others had only brought one traveler at a time. This one looked like it could probably handle seven. The big ring of gold in the floor attached to the center piece by spikes like the spokes of a wagon wheel. The spokes divided the floor into seven wedge-shaped sections. Each had runes built of obsidian and gold set into the floor. These included four markings shaped like demon footprints. As if a traveler was supposed to stand there when going through. If it did send one per wedge then this portal would transmit seven demons at once. Since it had no sign of melting or other damage they had to assume it was fully functional. Well, even if seven demons got through they had plenty of fighters present to deal with them. And the demons would be weak from the transport between worlds. The footprints weren't any larger than any of the demons he had encountered before, and that was comforting.

Near the altar Cyala and Sergio were arguing furiously, their voices echoing off the walls and cutting through the cold damp air. They were speaking in Spanish still, with the new humans and Sven of Belize listening closely. Namach had separated from the group and wandered off past the ranks of vampires to the opposite end of the cave where he was examining the cavern walls, ignoring the fierce argument. Whatever Cyala was saying angered Sven because soon he was pointing to the altar and talking loudly.

"Figures, they couldn't have straightened everything out beforehand." Daray muttered. "Sven's been a right pain in the ass, trying to get this done as soon as possible. If it were up to grandmother she would have waited another two weeks. However, the Masters of Central America are tired of waiting and said they'd do it today with or without her help."

"What's wrong with destroying it today?" Rahkesh asked.

"Not enough information. Grandmother thinks there's something we're overlooking here. Namach agrees with her, but there are sixteen old vampires running Central America and they all disagree. The fae did their own evaluation and they also think it should be removed as soon as possible and nothing has been overlooked. You should have heard grandmother last night; I don't think I've ever heard such a rant before. She's certain there's more to this than that altar."

It seemed to Rahkesh that if the two ancients sensed something was off then they should probably not be doing this. Those two were more likely to sense something going wrong than anyone else was. The local humans seemed divided; two of them were vigorously siding with Sergio, while the rest seemed to be arguing for more time. Apparently the local humans weren't quite ready to take such a risk if something might go wrong. Eventually their two companions agreed and fell silent. Losing his support Sergio called over a few of his researchers and Sven.

"Sven wants this over with today." Silas said as the Master of Belize started into a long list of reasons for removing the portal immediately. "It seems like the mortals are willing to wait for a few days, if there's something specific Cyala wants to do."

The fae listened to the heated debate silently for a few minutes before cutting in and siding with Sven and Sergio. With them backing him Sven was getting angry and had just about started shouting, until Cyala growled at him and he lowered his voice.

"They think any risk is minimal. What is important is to remove this portal. Doing it at anytime includes some measure of risk. The fae think that further study will not reveal anything new that would make the process easier or harder." Silas said, listening to the argument. "They have a point, they've been working for months and haven't found anything new for some time. They've got the magics pinpointed from all the work last year and ever since they found this place they've been examining it. There isn't much left to find."

Eventually Namach finished his examination of the walls and moved back to the group, who were now shouting at each other again. He said something to Cyala in a different language, which, going by the confused looks all around, no one else knew. Cyala replied in the same, Namach responded with a thoroughly wolfish grin. The two ancients calmed down, shrugged off everyone's questions, and began waving everybody away from the altar. Whatever had been bothering them moments before had been decided.

"Why do I have a feeling this is going to go horribly wrong?" Rahkesh asked, whishing silently that he were _anywhere_ but here right now. He really didn't feel like tackling a pack of angry demons today. His brain still ached from his work with Silas and his bloodmagic had not yet healed entirely from his most recent near-death experience. It would be another two or three days until he was in top form again.

"Because it probably will." Daray replied, "and I bet grandmother and Namach know it too."

"Then why would they let it happen?"

"So they can say "I told you so", and probably get an excuse to kill off Sergio and Sven for disobeying them." Daray said. "Well maybe not Sergio. Not his fault he can't sense whatever they can, his focus is with living things. His skill with plants and animals is unbelievable - he's just a failure at death magic. But Sven ought to know better. This isn't the first time he's ignored grandmother's warnings and had it come back to bite him in the ass."

Rahkesh sighed and glanced around, to find that most of the vampires present seemed almost eager to finish this. He had hoped this would be a straightforward portal destruction and maybe he'd be able to summon Sharahak. Now he was certain this was all going to go very wrong very soon. Didn't Sergio feel at least a little concerned about messing with an opening to the demon realm when there was even a possibility of something malfunctioning?

"Aren't we going to need some sacrifices for this?" Rahkesh asked. Death magics were what opened these portals. His two friends shrugged.

Near the gold altar the fae, a little surprised at having abruptly won their argument, moved away to let the work begin. Rather than victorious they now looked a bit nervous, ancient vampires didn't back down suddenly for no reason, and they certainly hadn't been convinced of the wisdom of opening the portal today. The lead auror set his group along one wall and went over to Namach, where they began conversing in whispers. The auror team did not look happy about the outcome at all. Nor did anyone else. Except for Cyala and Namach, who, having lost the argument, now abruptly looked almost gleefully anticipatory. This did not bode well for anyone. If demons did get through and there was a battle they'd be able to hold it over the other vampires for centuries. Rahkesh again wished he were elsewhere. A fight in the caverns under Mexico with demons was not his idea of a happy afternoon. Even if neither Cyala nor Namach looked overly concerned, this was still a bad idea. The two could probably handle any demons that came through on their own if necessary, but Rahkesh didn't want to get caught in the crossfire.

Everyone moved out of the way while Cyala signaled Norovosi, her nephew, in to begin the ritual. Rahkesh inwardly winced and prepared to _not _throw up, faint, or something equally embarrassing. Norovosi was a White Necromancer, employing the pain, blood and deaths of others to work his magic.

Several dark angels dropped down from where they had been flying around the ceiling. They swooped in low and dropped a total of forty-nine bodies around the altar, seven per floor segment. Confirming Rahkesh's thought that this portal brought travelers through in each of the seven wedges built into the floor. None of the bodies were moving, but when Rahkesh carefully sensed the magics around them he noted that they were very much alive.

"Took a lot of time to choose them. We don't know how the ritual changes, since the portal gets weaker with each use the ritual has to be stronger, so they had to be extra careful and find perfect sacrifices. You can brute-force this stuff but that's only a back-up plan. Norovosi compared it to restoring an old painting; you have to use _just_ the right paints and brushes. The sacrifices all have the same blood type, related no further apart than sixth cousins, free of all disease, minimal mutations." Daray whispered to Rahkesh, "however they're all convicted criminals who were going to die anyway. Norovosi wouldn't care one way or the other, but the mortals insisted on only using criminals."

Two dark angels dropped down to the bodies and set them out, on their backs, arms out to either side. Rahkesh glanced over to the skeletons on the altar and realized that the altar images were actually instructions. Every person would need to supply one major organ to provide a fresh almost-alive magical organ to power the portal. It seemed logical that having the correct organs was essential – each organ used in the ritual corresponded to an organ on a traveler – ensuring that they came through intact.

_Sygra this is going to be messy. _

_How much?_

_They're going to remove a major organ from each, and create chains to link them out of their skins._ Rahkesh said, guessing at what the chains on the altar meant. A second later knives came out and the dark angels began removing long strips of skin.

_Ssssss. The things these demons come up with. It is logical I suppose. Couldn't there be a less messy way? _Sygra complained. The serpent rested her head on his shoulder and shut her eyes. Rahkesh relaxed back against the wall, schooled his face into a mask of perfect immobile indifference, and used his bloodmagic to turn off any disgusted scent he might give off, while determinedly keeping his eyes open and not looking at the Necromancer directly. This didn't light up the runes on his skin and allowed him to not insult anyone or give away a weakness with his smell. No way was he letting the vampire know how repulsive this was. Even though he was certain a good many of them weren't watching either. In fact, he could see several from where he sat that had their eyes closed outright.

Almost immediately Daray began to growl softly. The altar had activated as soon as the sacrifices were chained together. Strips of skin bound their wrists and throats to each other, and a dim glow began to appear, coming from the outer ring of gold around the altar. Daray sniffed the air and snorted. Rahkesh shifted so that he blocked Daray into the corner, where no one else could see if he suddenly transformed. Beside him Silas did the same and the two traded doomed looks.

Norovosi shook his hair out of his dark eyes, picked up a black knife, and motioned the others away. The dark forms leaped into the air and circled up and off to the sides. The White Necromancer moved around the circle of bodies to the one farthest away from where the skinning had started. Without any hesitation he knelt and began cutting out a frozen man's lung, the left one. Rahkesh fixed his gaze on the altar instead of the bloody sight, and firmly clamped down on any negative feelings that might have gotten into his scent. Those people could feel everything being done to them.

As Norovosi added the organs to the pit in the center of the massive block of gold that made up most of the altar, the ring set into the floor began to glow brighter. Light circled around the gold ring and then started down the spokes towards the center altar. Slowly the outer ring began to give off random flashes of light. Like the sparkle of flashing light bulbs the ring blinked and sparked. Bits and pieces lit up then went dark. The lights began to speed up, from soft quick snaps like those of a firefly to faster brighter flashes of light. Bright sparkling bursts that crashed off in random directions and soon the altar looked like a fireworks display of massive bursts of glittery light. The cave walls seemed to dance as the light flashed on and off around the hanging stalactites.

Norovosi added more of the required organs to the altar and the golden ring began to flash bright, then the spokes joined in with their own light array. A glowing began in the center. Dancing lights flew from the altar lighting up the cave's dim interior, outshining the lights from carefully placed torches. Pieces of the altar itself were soon joining the show snapping off light and then going dark before flashing again. Flashes of pearl and gold and silver blew off the golden ring. Like fireworks blasting out in circles and shimmering across the golden surfaces and sparkling walls of cavern. The cavern gave the lights a rainbow array of colors until the room was alive with blinding bursts of color. The outpouring of lights grew greater and sharper in their intensity, building steadily as every piece of gold on the altar flashed.

Rahkesh raised a hand to cover his eyes as the lights from the altar danced around the room, blinding everyone. The lights sped up; moving so fast and so bright the altar became invisible inside, an explosion of light.

Then it went dark. The glow vanished, the flashing lights stopped. The torches went out, the glow from the entrances went dark. The individual lights on wands blinked out.

Slowly a few of the torches began to glow again, tiny flames reappearing and flickering. The golden altar had turned black, the blood dripping over the top of it running red down the sides. Rahkesh lowered his hand from his eyes and glanced around. Nothing had happened. Slowly he removed his bloodmagics from blocking off his scent and readjusted his eyes to the dim light.

RRRRAAARRRRGGGHHH

Daray lunged past him, knocking Rahkesh flat, black wings spreading wide above their heads. The demon screamed another warning and drove all four sets of claws into a gray demon that dropped from the ceiling.

Blood splattered to the floor and everyone looked up.

Demons. Hundreds of them. The entire cavern was filled with demons. Lined up in ranks in the air, wings moving silently. Row after row after row of demons. Rahkesh leaped to his feet and turned to look beyond the army of vampires.

They were surrounded; standing behind them was another army of demons, wielding shining weapons they stood silently, waiting.

Daray tore the throat from the gray he had tackled. The demon lurched and shrieked once before its blood sprayed across the floor.

The demon army attacked. From above the demons dove for the dark angels, from behind the vampires the demon army surged forwards at a run. The demons swung their weapons, long curving swords, down and let out a chilling roar.

The vampires and demons clashed with a force that shook the floor. Bodies of the front lines crushed together by the ranks behind. Vampires fell as their hearts were cut out, their bodies rotting and turning to dust in seconds. Demons screamed and clawed as the front line of vampires hurled acid spells and tore at them with knives and fangs.

Rahkesh dodged as a demon hit the ground, followed by a dark angel that slammed into the demon hard enough to crush it. Sabien Ateres, now wreathed in flames and fully visible, wrapped one massive hand around the demon's head, and tore it off its neck.

Screaming demons plummeted from above, closing in to land on Sabien, pinning him to the floor, their great jaws snapping at his wing joints. Sabien roared and fire flared. The dark angel's wings rose, sweeping through the bodies of the demons as a ghost would sweep through a wall. The demon screams turned into shrieks of agony as the flaming wings turned them to ash as they passed through. Sabien jumped upward, lashing out with a set of twin swords, taking the wings off of the next demon to attack him.

More demons were coming, dodging around the dark angels and winging for the ground. Rahkesh thought fast, the demons wanted to get into the center of the circle the vampires fae, and humans had formed. From there they could attack from outside and from within.

Rahkesh transformed. His ribs snapped and his spine grew, extra vertebrae cracking into existence. His limbs vanished and thick scales as hard as metal spread over him, his teeth elongated and he felt venom splash into his mouth.

The demons squawked and flapped aside as their landing space vanished under the Basilisk's massive body. The hiss that filled the carven stopped the fighting dead for an instant as everyone stared. Then Rahkesh lifted his scaled head and turned his deadly gaze on the demons.

A horrible scream of agony erupted from the foremost demon's throat. Its eyes rolled over into the back of its head and it collapsed to floor, disappearing into Rahkesh's coils. Rahkesh constricted and ground his coils, feeling bones snap as the demon was crushed. He flicked his tongue out, sensing the positions of the angels and demons, then lunged, jaws closing around a big brown and gray demon, fangs sliding all the way through its body, injecting lethal venom and puncturing its lungs. It felt delicious on his fangs, and tasted even better. Rahkesh barely stopped himself from eating it.

The fight began again, the two armies crashing together. Rahkesh dropped the demon in his jaws and fixed his gaze on another, who, stupidly or accidentally, met his eyes.

Rahkesh's basilisk form might be young, but his variety, the Asian Red, was the second largest basilisk subspecies, and coiled around the altar he took up the entire space in the center of the cavern. He swung his head about, smashing into airborne demons and sending them into tumbling collisions with the cavern walls. With something solid at their backs the vampires, fae and aurors could attack outwards. Rahkesh raised the elongated scales on his spine, which bore sharp spikes, impaling a demon that was trying to bite through his thick armored scales.

Sergio was shouting orders; the vampires threw out shields, knocking the demons back. Next disintegration spells, hurled from more than a hundred wands, lashed out into the packed ranks of the demon army. Behind the momentary confusion and panic the spells caused, Namach began his work, rippling white fire danced from the ancient's hands, tearing into the souls of the demons it hit and dragging them out, or sliding in through their noses and eyes and exploding them from within. Bloodmagic runes glowed golden on his skin and the walls of the cavern, behind the demons, froze. Long pieces of ice sharpened and rotated outwards, forming a wall of needle thin razor sharp spines several meters long. The fae had gathered and launched a sparkling burst of green across the packed demons. Demon collapsed left and right, writhing and screaming, clawing at their faces. The ice on the wall solidified, and leaped forward into the demon army. The sharpened ice spears flew straight through the bodies of hundreds as they rushed inward.

Above the dark angels vanished into shadow, then the dark forms leaped, wrapping their shadow wings around the bodies of demons in a lethal embrace, ripping their lives out as the wings passed through them. Demon bodies fell in a rain of lifeless shells.

The ice spears stopped just short of hitting the vampire ranks, then they moved into a wall of ice, and recoiled outwards, pushing the demons out in a wave. Demons screamed and clawed at the ice wall. Their claws and tails raking great pieces off. Behind them the cavern walls grew another layer of ice spears, and the ice wall drove the demons onto the spears.

From within the mass of writhing dying demons light began to appear. A dark red glow. Snapping sounds made Rahkesh shiver, he dropped the two demons he was currently mutilating in his jaws and swung around the watch. Dark red magic spread. The demons rose again and the ice began to melt. From within the ranks appeared nearly a hundred demons in gold armor, the glow reaching outwards from their bodies. Demon sorcerers.

Wings rose and dark fire gathered. With a sharp crack of his wings the lead demon hurled a comet of magical fire into the vampires. The vampires turned to ash on contact, screaming out then vanishing into piles of dust. Scores of massive balls of dark red flames, flung from the demons wings, forced the vampires to break ranks, scattering avoid the fire. The slower ones vanished into puffs of ash. The demons moved forward, hurling their deadly magic. Vampires dodged and scattered, firing off spells to slow them. Some of the demon sorcerers began raising waves of magic that ripped the counter spells from the air. The lead demon rallied the fighters and sent them after the disorganized vampires, leaping upwards into the air, and then dropping from above to bite off heads.

Namach, who had been at the center of the section of vampires facing the entrance to the cavern, strode forward ignoring the vampires flinging themselves out the way of the fire the demons were wielding. The lead demon noticed the ancient and barked out a sharp order. The demons collectively turned and attacked with a wave of flaming death.

Namach reached forward with one hand, and growled, loudly. The vampires nearest fainted as the ancients' magic filled growl turned to a roar that stopped all movement in the cavern.

The dark fire balls exploded. Magic crashed from Namach's hand flinging black magic into each explosion, rolling the magic backwards. Speeding up, racing backward and expanded into a roiling mass of solid darkness.

The demon sorcerers took to the air, dodging away as the magics sought them out. Whips expanded from the black explosions, dragging them back in. Rahkesh watched, fascinated, as the black magic ate out the souls of the demons, then pulled out the magic of their life energy, along with their power, turned it into a liquid form, and sprayed over the demon army. Turned acidic by Namach's magic the rain of liquefied life burned gaping holes right through the bodies it hit.

The lead sorcerer snarled, stopped his flight, closed his wings, and dropped. His wings bent forward, sharp wing claws glistening, sliver and blue magic swirling over him and trailing out behind. Namach ignored the descending demon, then, slowly and deliberately, turned at the last possible second, his own magic flared in a burst of white heat followed by red and black spells. The two collided and magic exploded outwards, knocking everyone away, leaving a massive empty space around them.

Magic slid along magic, making screeching noises like metal clashing, or nails down a black board. Tendrils of gold whipped out around them as the two fought, invisible within the crackling magic.

Sergio rallied his vampires with a roar. The old city master pulled out thread and began tying knots. Rahkesh watched as injured vampires healed and were pulled to their feet by others. Sven led the remainder of his force in a charge at a packed group of demons, weapons appearing in the vampire's hands. The demons drew their own weapons and attacked back.

_Ssssss Tasssssty demonssss!_ Rahkesh looked around and found Sygra wrapped around a stalactite, snapping out, injecting venom into demons as they flew passed, her numbing poison stopping them from feeling anything. He laughed; hissing softly, as the young basilisk happily lunged and bit with lightning speed.

Sliding his tail out of his coils Rahkesh swung it, smacking demons out of the air. He snapped and bit, imitating Sygra. Sharp careful jabs, his basilisk instincts kicking in, snapping a demon of the air with each bite. Sinking his fangs through their bodies then dropping them to the floor.

Dark angels swung around his upraised head and threw fire at the demons, making them dodge aside. A second pack of angels dropped from great fissures in the ceiling, striking into the demons backs with knives. The great flaming wings washed through demon bodies, burning them internally.

Rahkesh reached for the thunderbird, intending to electrocute all of them, and froze when it didn't respond. The thunderbird was still exhausted from his near brush with death days before. Rahkesh hissed his annoyance; he was not in the best of shape for this, with a good portion of his electrical magic out of reach. So instead he used his bloodmagic to channel it.

The thunder shook the cavern hard enough to knock stalactites off the ceiling, sending them crashing down on everyone below. Great bolts of lightning shot away from him, crackling outwards in branching arms of light that zapped demons from the air. Striking out darting spears of lightning setting off great peals of thunder that covered the demons screams as limbs were ripped off by the lightning.

A dozen demons dodged around Rahkesh's jaws and dove, hitting his side and clawing into him. Their claws scratched at his scales with sharp grating noises. But the basilisk scales were strong and the demons couldn't tear them. Then one of them bit down and sent its venom washing over his scales and in between. And that hurt. Rahkesh roared and twisted as the demon's venom created indentation in his scales big enough for them to get their claws into. Rahkesh drew on his shielding bloodmagics, nearly unusable in his basilisk form, and shot it through with electricity.

The entire length of his snake form glowed with the gold of bloodmagic runes, lightning crackled over his scales and the demon were blown off of him, thrown against the cavern walls hard enough that their bones snapped.

Now all below him was chaos, ranks broken the demons, vampires, fae and aurors attacked each other in scrabbling one-on-one fights and small bloody groups battled across the cavern floor. Rahkesh dragging two demons out of the air by their wings and dropped them into his coils, crushing them. He swept his tail around and raised his head, twisting and catching demons in neck coils and snapping their bones. Dropping his head down Rahkesh spotted a pack of demons and spat venom over them. A wandless spell followed and the venom erupted in bright red flames.

The auror team, remarkably all were still alive, was chasing a pack of scattering demons between the giant stalagmites. Curses and hexes were flying at the dodging demons. The demons finally found themselves with their backs to a wall and turned to fight. The aurors pulled down the overhanging stalactites and used summoning spells to drag the demons beneath them to be crushed.

The green fae were kneeling in a circle, long vines growing form their hands across the floor. Thorned vines darted and snatched demons running past, dragging them down into the mass of green tendrils where vines ripped their eyes out and went into their brains. It looked like a thoroughly excruciating death. Meanwhile the other fae were using threadmagic to build wolves out of fallen stones, and sending them after the demons. The massive stone canines were tearing the demons apart as the demon's claws scrabbled uselessly against them.

The cavern was filled with dead and dying beings, more than half of the original forces, demon and vampire, were dead or about to die. The remaining fighting was confined to small groups battling it out in corners between the stalagmites and rubble. Above the Ateres had decidedly won their battle, there were no demons left in the air, though they also seemed to be missing at least two of their angels. Seeing no reason to stay put Rahkesh stretched out, careful to keep one coil around the altar – he didn't want any demons getting to it – and began smashing his long body across groups of demons, flattening them, making them easy targets for the fae and aurors. Spotting one of the demon sorcerers who had his back turned Rahkesh lunged and bit through him. The spell on the demons claws fizzled and died. Rahkesh choked on the magical backlash and jerked back, spitting as he felt his tongue burn.

Turning Rahkesh caught the eyes of three demon sorcerers that were getting ready to attack him. Concentrating he flung the magic of his killing gaze into their minds, and watched them drop screaming. They were not dead, his snake senses could hear their hearts, but they were unconscious. He looped a coil around them and dragged them closer, then rolled his full weight onto them and pressed, feeling their wings break and bones give out.

Something struck Rahkesh across the head, knocking him aside. Pain shot through his head and he felt blood run down his back. He turned ready to attack, and saw blue magic roar past, inches from his eyes. The other demon sorcerers had seen him attack their comrades. A group of them now launched a mass of ripping dark blue magic at Rahkesh's head. Rahkesh avoided most of it, and felt the scales on his cheek get ripped off by the bit that struck him. With the scales hanging loosely from bits of flesh Rahkesh threw his fully body at the sorcerers, sending out an intense cold spell before him, followed by a bone crushing hex. The leader of the pack dropped as his spine was crushed and the others dove aside. Rahkesh snapped up one of them, and nearly lost an eye for it as the demon, fatally pierced by his fangs, dragged its wing claws over his left eye, raking great gashes. Rahkesh closed his eyes to protect them, hard scaled lids sliding down. Reaching out he sensed their positions, and next magical attack.

Now all the remaining demon sorcerers were on him, fighting to get at the altar. Venom dripped in between his scales, and Rahkesh involuntarily shrieked in pain. Teeth gouged into his tail and into the spots where blood from the venom wounds ran over his scales. Magic shot in deep, snapping tendons. Rahkesh wrapped another coil around the altar and twisted, unharmed scales rolling outward to deflect demon magical attacks. Rahkesh cracked his tail over their heads then used his bloodmagic shielding to brush them off his body, where they had grabbed on like ticks and dug in. Basilisks weren't the most agile beasts, but Rahkesh avoided the next spell and caught the wing of one of his attackers with a lightning bolt, ending its flying abilities.

Now the Ateres dark angels dropped from above, sweeping in from behind the demons and latching onto them. But when their massive wings came down to destroy them the demon sorcerer's armor burned gold and the wings hit them solidly instead of sliding through. Not particularly perturbed the assassins drew their weapons and began taking the demons apart. The sorcerers retaliated with magic, splashing magic off the flames that wrapped the dark angel's bodies.

Cyala was the last to arrive and when she did she turned the fire of her angel form black and called up her combined bloodmagic and threadmagic offensive magics, creating a haze that covered several of the fighting demons like a thick frog. Shimmering nets of magic appeared within, turning blue then silver, before falling to wind around the demons. Then Cyala opened a set of runes on her hands and neck, and the magic snapped inwards, becoming solid, like thin sharp wire, and drawing through everything in its path. The demons were torn apart as the magical wires cut through them, leaving them in pieces on the ground.

A great thunderous sound echoed, rumbling up from beneath the cavern. The earth shook and huge cracks appeared across the cavern floor. From the mass of flying magic where Namach and the lead demon sorcerer were battling a brilliant wave of red light erupted and shot down into the earth. Then it came blasting out again, racing tendrils of red magic up the walls to create a net surrounding the entire cavern and all within it.

Then the whole cavern began to melt. The heat rose to almost unbearable levels and the walls of solid rock heated until they become liquid. The stalactites dripped molten rock before falling from the ceiling. Underneath the floor became so hot Rahkesh had to cast a continuous freezing spell to keep from burning.

The demon sorcerer and Namach broke apart, the demon collapsing backwards to the ground. Both its wings had ripped from its body, leaving gaping wounds. Namach moved away, dodging streaks of purple magic, graceful on his feet like a dancer. The demon lurched to its feet, its magical armor sealing its wounds, and roared. Namach laughed and roared right back, the power in his voice sending beings stumbling across the cavern. The ancient vampire bore great bloody gouges all over his chest and back, some deep enough to be cutting the bone, and the wounds didn't appear to be healing. The demon sorcerer snarled and cast a spell, ripping the melting floor up and throwing it at Namach's face in a wave of lava.

As the vampire blasted the attack away the demon leaped for the altar, and the battling basilisk, dark angels and demon sorcerers. Rahkesh swung down and fixed the demon with his stare. The demon avoided his eyes and went for the floor, coming up from beneath he sank his claws into the edges of Rahkesh's belly scales and shot magic through him.

Rahkesh screamed as he felt his ribs shatter; sharp agonizing pain lacing through his chest. He wrapped around the demon and sent lightning through him. The thunder shook the melting cavern ceiling and get mats of melted rock began to fall. Lightning danced over Rahkesh's body and the demon trapped in his coils screamed and clawed at him.

The last of the lesser sorcerers were dragging down by the dark angels. Spilling their guts across the floor and spells and weapons finally ripped through their armor. Rahkesh felt the one he was crushing release a spell and jerked away as it ripped open his back. Roaring Rahkesh twisted again as the demon lunged, digging its claws into the open wound and tearing at him.

Rahkesh transformed, ribs vanishing, vertebra snapping out of existence, arm and legs regrowing. In seconds he was human again and he fell over, the demon coming down on top of him. Rahkesh rammed a knife upwards, through the demon's wing joint where it met the body.

Blood splashed around them as the Ateres finished off the other demons and the lead sorcerer lurched free, diving for the altar. Rahkesh hurled the knife into his back, and saw it glance off the armor. Namach appeared, grabbing two attacking demons and crushing them, one skull snapping in each hand, and then leaped after the sorcerer, tackling him just short of the altar.

Spinning the two discharged magic, ripping at the other's souls, the shockwave crackled across the cavern floor. Namach broke away turned, and paused, with the altar at his back, facing the demon. The sorcerer's armor was glowing and as Rahkesh watched his wings regrew.

The altar was starting to glow again – blood had splashed across it during the fight. Rahkesh stared as sparks began to fly from the set of footprints the blood had hit. The wedge shaped sections were getting ready to open. This was what they had intended to do to destroy it, but this wasn't planned.

"Rahkesh." It was the White Necromancer, Norovosi, "I believe you had someone you wanted to summon." Norovosi said, dragging Rahkesh to his feet, Rahkesh nearly collapsed as horrible pain flew from his side. His ribs were broken, badly, he had demon venom dripping from a wound on his hip and his back was laid open deep enough to almost see his spine. Fighting back tears, unsuccessfully, Rahkesh let Norovosi help him to the altar. The vampire went to one of the wedge sections that was glowing and bent over it. Rahkesh drew a knife and cut gently into the runes for his healing magics. Once the scratches on his elbows, wrists, and stomach began to bleed the bloodmagic activated and swirling gold runes grew across his skin and began to heal him.

Behind him the demon roared and deflected a thrown spear from one of the aurors. The team, amazingly still alive, had arrived, spreading out behind the demon sorcerer. The massive armored creature roared fire at them, forcing them to dodge. This one was larger than the others, and much more powerful. Namach waved them back and moved to keep himself between the demon and the altar. While Norovosi worked to open the portal Rahkesh turned to watch.

Up close the sorcerer was even larger than Daray, solid gray with black markings down his wings. The magic he seemed to leak from his scales was intense and awful, leaving Rahkesh's stomach lurching when he tried to feel it. A sharp sound drew Rahkesh's attention and he saw the Ateres moving away from the demon bodies as they began to glow. Then the sorcerer's armor crackled and sparkled.

The demon was drawing magic from the deaths of its fellows. The runes of its armor grew brighter as each of the disemboweled demons on the floor died. Their deaths fueled it, healing it, giving it more magic. With every demon they had killed the leader had been growing stronger. The demon waited until its wings were back, then gave a nasty grin and growled at Namach.

The ancient vampire rolled his eyes almost comically then raised both hands, magic gathering. The demon lunged –

and exploded, three meters from the vampire its body blew apart. Tiny bits of smoking flesh shriveled and fell to the floor, blood sprayed over everyone nearby, bathing them in bits and pieces. Its armor vaporized.

There was silence in the cavern. Namach glanced around, then growled softly and knelt to touch the floor. The melting stopped, the glow of heat slowly dimmed as the ancient froze everything. The ceiling stopping dripping, and heat from the floor no longer burned.

Flames erupted from the altar, shooting straight up in a pillar of fire. Everyone dove for the floor as more fire shot from each wedge shaped section, rippling out and up in massive fireballs. From within screaming noises were coming, roaring, hissing, and the flapping of great wings. Rahkesh, nearly unconscious with pain, rolled to his side, facing the flaming altar, and began to cut open the summoning spell on his arms.

Immediately the connection surged, leaping to his blood that Sharahak carried. Sharahak was alive, and in the demon realm. Rahkesh felt his energy rushing out of him, leaving him so exhausted that his head fell to the floor with a painful thud and his arms dropped, unable to move. The connection was dragging magic out of him, using it to open a path through the portal, across the wards and enchantments, and through the demon realm to Sharahak.

Seconds later Rahkesh, his vision starting to dim, felt, as though from far away, Sharahak's mind. A soft whisper of a touch across his senses, confusion, then recognition and a wordless question slipped back to him from the demon vampire. Rahkesh forced his eyes open and sent back his summons.

The flames around the altar turned black, leaving the room in near darkness, then they roared into full fire again and the shrieking demonic war cry ripped through the air. Winged forms shimmered into existence all around the altar, seven of them. The altar seemed to pulse, then the fire from where the pile of organs lay inside went solid red. As Rahkesh watched the altar began to melt, gold dripping and crumbling, blood washing over the top.

"They're sending too many sorcerers through!" Norovosi bellowed. "They're going to destroy the portal to get them here!"

Green and blue light crackled off of armor as six demon sorcerers, in gold and black armor identical to the lead sorcerer of the previous attackers, leaped into the air. The demons winged high overhead, then turned and plummeted to the group around the altar. A wave of yellow and orange magic blasted downwards.

Namach's skin glowed, raising both arms over his head the ancient snarled, magic burst from his palms in a shimmering white shield, reaching out to cover the entire floor of the cavern in a shimmering dome of magic. The demonic magic slammed into his shield and flared painfully bright, then washed off like water off of glass.

The Ateres took to the air, flying through the shield wiping demonic spells from the air with their flames. The sorcerers conjured and threw waves of acid back at the angels by snapping their wings and flinging the acid off of them. The Ateres responded with bloodmagic shields and brushed off the acid. Below everyone ducked as Namach's shield snapped out again, absorbing the acid and vaporizing it.

From the last section of the portal black fire erupted, followed by a wave of blood that covered the floor and splashed across the altar. Four sets of wings appeared through the flames, fighting, tangled, claws shone as two demons fought.

Rahkesh felt through his connection to Sharahak that the demon had leaped through the portal at the same time as the seventh sorcerer. Now stuck in a fight to the death Sharahak was in trouble, he was not trained as a sorcerer himself, nor as large as the one he fought. Rahkesh gathered his magics, and sent them crashing along the connection to Sharahak, hoping desperately that the flood wouldn't kill him.

The altar exploded. Pieces of gold and obsidian and stone flew into the air and the ground shook. Everywhere the survivors fell over each other and above the last of the hanging stalactites crashed off the ceiling. White light flared from the portal where Sharahak and the sorcerer fought, followed by a wave fire rushing outwards. Namach countered the flying debris and fire, collapsing them backwards, while maintaining the aerial shield.

The demon sorcerers closed their wings and dropped from the air, screeching towards the ruined altar. They brought their wings around and pointed them downward, ahead of each a blue magic roared and zapped downward like lightning bolts. Namach's shield deflected all of them back up, forcing the demons and the dark angels to dodge frantically around flying bits of magic.

The seventh demon sorcerer lunged from the flames of the last portal section, crashing headlong into Namach. The ancient rolled and came back to his feet, spinning to face the charging demon. The vampire met the demon head on. Lunging so fast he blurred Namach ripped both the demon's eyes out, then sank the thumb of each hand into the eye socket and back into the brain, grabbing the demon's head, using its empty eye sockets and cheeks to grip, he ripped it's skull in half. Brains splattered and the demon collapsed to a heap at his feet.

Rahkesh's vision spun, his blood pounded in his ears. The pain in his back felt like his was on fire and his ribs hurt like a cruciatus curse. He felt as if he was falling, watching as a demon plummeted from above directly at him. Distantly he heard Daray shout a warning. Then pain spiked through his legs and Rahkesh heard someone scream, felt bone break. The demon's jaws crushed through his leg.

And the thunderbird finally woke, screaming with rage, Rahkesh's body jerked like a live wire as lightning flew off of him in a massive blast of magic and electricity. Shrieking bolts of lightning spun off in a cascade of sparks. Thunder shook the cavern. Screaming in agony Rahkesh felt the thunderbird try to transform, and fail, too weak to manage it. Then his bloodmagic lit up with fiery pain as lightning blasted out of him. From every ritual he'd ever done, from every rune on his skin crackling waves of lightning leaped, ripping the flesh off of the demon attacking and scorching the floor to glass.

As Rahkesh stopped spasming and collapsed, unconscious, all of his bloodmagic runes glowed softly, then darkened and began to bleed. The demon crumpled to a heap off to the side. Sygra, having slid down the wall, rushed across the cavern floor and coiled up on Rahkesh, hissing at everyone threateningly.

Bodies were strewn across the floor, some dead, some alive, most injured and badly electrocuted. The lightning display had stopped all activity. But now the demons recovered and attacked. Magic rolled off their wings in sharp precision killing spells of bright red. Charging across the cavern floor they hurled their spells at the disoriented group near the destroyed altar.

Apart from the airborne Ateres, Namach was the only one standing and he began hurling spells back, neatly intercepting every one of those cast by the demons. Three of the Ateres were on the ground, ripped out of the air by the lightning bolts. The others dropped, coming in to stand around the five remaining demon sorcerers. Not far away the aurors and fae struggled upright, and Sergio limped over, his left leg charred to the bone from a lightning bolt.

"Damn it. Could have warned me you were bringing your private power plant to light the place." The City Master grouched, in English now. Cyala chuckled. Vampires who had fled from the magical discharge slowly gathered behind the demons. "We can take them. Do we want prisoners?" Sergio asked.

"I'll try to take one alive. Kill the rest." Namach said.

The demon sorcerers disagreed with this plan. As the dark angels closed in from above and the fae, aurors and remnants of the vampire force circled them on the ground the five began casting furiously. Blasts of fire and ripping spells that tore great pieces off the floor and were hurled at the circling dark angels, trying to get space to take flight. While four kept everyone dodging and shielding the fifth began creating the massive dark red fireballs the others had used and hurled them. The green fae intercepted them with a terrible green fire that ate through the fireballs and shot inwards, wrapping itself around the demon at the center and striking in through it sears and eyes, dragging it to the floor. Vampires attacked another with magical weapons, dodging magical attacks. Sergio broke through the demon's last shielding spells and one of his lieutenants put a sword through its neck.

One tried to flee to the air, where the entire clan of waiting dark angels converged in a roaring flaming battle that ended with the demon torn to shreds and charred. The fourth killed over a dozen vampires before it went down with Cyala's teeth in its throat and aurors blasting killing curses into its eyes. The last demon fought its way through the fae and vampires until Namach wrapped it in burning nets and dragging it down. The demon attacked as its wings charred, slashing at everything in reach and hurling spells that sent everyone diving for cover behind the rubble of the altar. Its magic tore through the burning nets and its spat venom, shrieking with rage and blew a cloud of poisonous gas out at the aurors. Finally Namach struck it across the neck, dropping it instantly.

In the silence that followed Cyala released the demon whose throat she was enjoying and moved over to the last one.

"I think you hit it too hard." Cyala said, nudging the demon with a boot. "It's dead."

"No it isn't." Elara, her daughter said. "Just comatose."

Cyala magically summoned her clan and began checking the injured. Janus had broken both legs and Grath was missing one wing. The aurors and fae had gone to gather their own injured, and seeing that Sergio was handling what remained of his and Sven's forces, Sierra and Namach went to check on Rahkesh.

RRRRRRRAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH

As Sierra reached down to check his pulse a demon dropped out of the shadows to land, crouched over Rahkesh roaring. Everyone spun, weapons reappearing, spells flying. The big demon bashed the magic away with its wings and let loose a wave of fire. The cream and gray demon beat its wing and crouched low, covering Rahkesh's body with its own, its massive claws raking great gouges into the floor. Its shining scales were torn and covered in deep tears and slashes, as though clawed. One of its wings had three parallel tears in it and blood ran from a set of bite marks on its throat. Sharahak had been summoned back to the human world, and had sensed through their connection that Rahkesh was badly hurt. Now not knowing what was going on or if any of these people were friendly, he roared fire and dug his claws in, prepared to defend the unconscious human if necessary.

As the fighters closed in on the latest threat Daray, in vampire form, pushed through the crowd to Namach's side.

"That's him, that Sharahak." He gasped out sharply.

"Hold!" The sharp command stopped the vampires instantly, while the fae and aurors turned to stare incredulously. The ancient waved the crowd aside and approached, the demon snarled and roared. Arching its wings back over its head it leaned forward and splayed its claws across Rahkesh's still body, lowering its head it sent fire racing across the floor from its nostrils.

The vampire approached, the flames glancing off his skin harmlessly. The demon glared and snarled, growling deep in its throat. Namach ignored the warning, he stopped a few meters away and waited until the demon met his eyes. The demon's snarls faded and the spines around its neck flittered while the spines along its back twitched. Namach leaned a little forward, not letting the demon look away. Fixed on the demon the ancient lowered all of his shields.

The magic that soared out sent the nearby vampires to their knees shaking. The fae collectively grimaced and back away while the aurors flinched back. Then the presence faded as Namach focused it onto the demon and blocked everyone else. The demon froze, every muscle going rigid, unmoving. Its eyes widened as it sought to break the vampire's gaze, and found it couldn't move. The growl faded and stopped. Then the demon's neck spines flattened, followed by the spikes along its back. It shivered and its wings twitched as vampiric instincts long forgotten loudly protested defying a superior. The crowd watched in amazement as slowly the demon's aggressive stance relaxed. As Namach bent and held out his hand a strange whine made its way out the demon's throat, then it slowly crouched forward to rest its head on his hand.

"Sharahak I presume?" The ancient asked gently.

XX

Rahkesh woke to a world of pain. He hurt everywhere. His skin ached as though from a bad burn and the agony from his legs nearly made him faint again. He was lying on something soft, and Sygra was hissing in his ear.

_Relax. You are safe. The battle is over, the portal is gone. Sharahak'ssss here. Your legs were badly shattered, as were three of your ribs. The wounds in your back are mostly healed but with the demon venom will take time to fade._

_Casualties?_

_Many. Sven of Belize and most of his, along with two thirds of Sergio's. No humans died, two of the wolf fae, and one of the green type. _

_Sven died?_

_Supposedly one of the sorcerers._

_Supposedly?_

_Namach. Sven had been extremely pushy trying to get the portal removed. He had been ignoring all advice on how to handle this from the beginning. He also tried to stop Namach from attending. I overheard that he did not care how many died as long as it was gone. He also is known for mistreating his vampires. And he has a second in command who will make a much better City Master._

_You've been doing a lot of eavesdropping. _

_Whatssssss?_

_Spying._

_Ah. You have been asleep for six hours. I was not going to leave. You foolish human, cannot take care of yourself._

_Sorry. I always pass out after transforming to a basilisk. _

_It's a snake. You should not. _

_It's a BIG snake. With no limbs and many more vertebrae and ribs. _

_Sssssssss _Sygra settled onto his chest and didn't respond. Snakes were never a problem.

Rahkesh hesitantly cracked his eyes open, not sure if he was ready to rejoin the world of the living. He was clean, and someone had cast a mending spell on his clothes. He was on a large couch in a massive sitting room. Across from him were other couches, and behind them enormous marble columns held up the roof as the room opened up to the air. There were no windows, no glass; the breeze blew through the room freely. Small trees grew at the edges of a massive open wall in large pots. The breeze was humid and hot, outside the clouds were golden from a setting sun. Outside he saw a flock of birds flying by, nearly level, and he realized that they must be very high up. Maybe even on a cliff.

"More of a hill actually." Namach's voice came from somewhere off behind him. The ancient vampires appeared, wearing dark red and black that looked like it had come from many centuries earlier. "And it is three days before yesterday." He added, answering Rahkesh's next unspoken question. Rahkesh rubbed his eyes and carefully closed down his occlumency shields, wondering if the vampire had picked through his mind while he slept. Or if he'd been projecting anything.

"What?" Rahkesh asked slowly, finally catching up with the last statement. Namach tapped the time turner attached to his arm by an ornate gold armband. The tiny hourglass hung on a short gold chain.

"It would be better for everyone if we did not miss too many days because of injuries. And I needed a location for the prisoners. This is one of my estates." Namach said, handing Rahkesh an emerald covered chalice with a potion inside. Rahkesh drank it and grimaced. "Overlooking the Nile. We're in Ethiopia." The vampire added. He raised a glowing hand and sent a wave of magic over Rahkesh's broken ribs. "Not healed yet. The demon who bit you didn't inject enough to kill, must have used all its venom earlier in the fight, maybe. Or it ran out with all the blood you lost." Rahkesh winced as Namach prodded the side of his head gently. He had a long gash running from one temple across most of his forehead. The wound healed a little more at the wave of healing magic. Rahkesh reached up to check if the fake skin covering his lightning bolt scar was still there, and encountered a thick bandage over his right cheek.

"Easy there, that one didn't heal much, it's still oozing. Best leave it. Professor Ahmad might be upset if you scarred your face." Namach said, leering. Rahkesh rolled his eyes, great, just great. He was getting teased by a three thousand year old vampire.

"Should invite the demons back to make sure it scars." Rahkesh muttered. Namach laughed and walked to sit down on a massive marble chair just across the circle of furniture from Rahkesh's couch.

"Sharahak?"

"Here." Namach said, Rahkesh glanced down and saw the big demon lying at Namach's feet, watching him silently. Daray, in vampire form, was seated beside Sharahak, and from the slightly unfocused eyes he guessed they were communicating telepathically. Cyala was on another couch, sipping a fluted crystal glass of blood.

"By the fact we are all alive, and I am guessing the elves didn't decide to annihilate us for opening a portal." Rahkesh said, agonizingly pushing himself up a bit to rest against the arm of the couch with a pillow behind him.

"No. Oh there were calls for the immediate death of every living human and whatnot. There always are. And they were ignored, as they usually are." Namach said. "These are elves they've been calling for our death for thousands of years without much action yet. They were a bit more interested in the appearance of a portal capable of summoning an army that had been lost into the earth for so long that a cave formed around it. That entire cavern was encased in gold and obsidian. The entire thing was a portal."

"Any others?"

"The elves are searching. Leave them to it. If there are more they'll find them. Ferraidar called in one of their better teams from some…other place...to take a look" Namach said. Not having to say that this "other place" might not be anywhere in their arm of the galaxy, or even this universe. The elves never specified _where_ anything was happening. Preferring to keep everyone in the dark. And if Namach knew more he wasn't saying.

"Didn't they search after the last demon war?" Rahkesh _had_ actually taken the time to find the records in the Akren library.

"Yes."

"They missed one."

"Yes."

"Intentionally?" Rahkesh asked. Elves did have better precognitive abilities than any other species.

"Would they ever tell?' Namach asked back with not so much a grin as a fang-flashing grimace. "I suspect so. In fact I suspect one of Ferraidar's predecessors had something to do with it. It is part of the job as their Champion to manage for the best possible future of their species. And _then_ everyone else."

"Huh, figures." Rahkesh sighed, "is there a reason why I can't fully see color?" To his fogged mind this was just registering, rather alarmingly. His color vision was fading in and out like some sort of demented kaleidoscope.

"I suppose you were unconscious – your bloodmagic overloaded. It couldn't handle what you were requiring of it. It did what was needed though, and you're paying the price for it now. Most of your runes were bleeding steadily when we got here. They've stopped now, but you won't be using any of your bloodmagic for at least a week. None. If you do you'll pass out and they'll be ripped open again." Namach said. "However, while they're healing, you do have plenty of time to figure out what's wrong with your bloodmagic. This should allow you to observe the healing process and find any problems."

"Yeah, about that. I haven't been able to find anything." Rahkesh said, "however when I did try to look around I noticed some strange fluctuations, they were coming from the parselmagic. It didn't seem wrong, or dangerous really, just odd, very odd, and rather uncomfortable." Nmaach thought it over for a moment.

"Perhaps it's time for you to talk to some of the older parseltongues around. They may be able to offer some advice. And while they may not have experienced anything like this themselves they may know of others who have. I'm not aware of any Basilisks alive right now, except for Voldemort, but there is a runespoor. A vampire, he attended Akren about two hundred years ago."

"I suppose. Runespoors are magical so maybe there are some similarities. What's interesting is that I can't find any information on this in the parselmagic itself."

"Your magic is damaged." Namach reminded him. Apart from the loss of his healing abilities Rahkesh _had _lost some of the library of knowledge in his magic. He hadn't noticed any _large_ missing pieces, but if he couldn't find out what was happening it either meant that he didn't have it anymore or it just wasn't in the magic to begin with.

Daray blinked and shook his head, snapping out of his trance-like state. Sharahak rolled his neck around as their minds closed off again. The demon blinked around and caught sight of Rahkesh, he grinned toothily and flapped a wing.

"Tomorrow will be soon enough for your transformation, a good sized cave or secure room will suffice." Sharahak said.

"I have a place for that." Cyala said. "We have to go over there anyway with a few of the prisoners."

"Prisoners?" Rahkesh asked.

"Silas did a truly superb job." Cyala said proudly. "Between him the Nuri they hypnotized six demons. Had them bound, unconscious and waiting for us in the entrance cave after the fight. He's off looking after them right now, practicing with Nuri for the next fight. Demons work a little differently, the only reason they didn't get more was that it took them a while to figure out how to get around the natural demon mind defenses." Cyala explained, with a broad smile. The ancient matriarch was practically purring with glee.

Silas's success had to be a relief for everyone, and especially for Silas and Nuri. The Ateres were composed of only the best, and for a long time now Silas hadn't been showing much of anything special. He had done well in bloodmagic, and continued doing it, but he would never advance to any of the higher level stuff. His potions, threadmagic, charms, dueling, transfiguration, runic magic, and fighting skills were well above average, but nothing close to spectacular. Up until now his animagus had been his only real accomplishment. Now with a proven ability to mass hypnotize, and the ability to transmit magic between him and his familiar, Silas had suddenly become extremely valuable.

What exactly would have happened to him had his abilities not worked out so well was a question Rahkesh hadn't ever asked, not wanting to discourage him. Probably he would have done what his parents had and left the Ateres (whether they had left of their own volition was another thing Rahkesh had never asked about) to make his own way in the world. And probably would have done very well, eventually. He was certainly superior to most of vampires under a century in the world right then. Rahkesh did know from Daray that Cyala had not been pleased when Silas parents had decided to adopt and turn a child. She had wanted to end that offshoot of her bloodline. Though they had been the Masters of a major city they hadn't been a success in Cyala's terms. She had insisted on selecting their child for them, and had chosen Silas because of his potential; Cyala had a rare magic sensing ability that she used to pick only the best infants for her family. She had been thinking that maybe he'd turn out better than his vampiric parents, but not really expecting them to be able to do much. A child being turned into a vampire gets most of its direction and more interesting powers from its parents, Silas parents had had none to speak of, not from the viewpoint of the powerful Ateres family.

However during the search for a suitable child she had also found Daray. Cyala had taken him instantly, and fought the then Master of New York (U.S) to the death for the right to turn him. Daray had been kept within the family and turned by Elara and Sabien, two of Cyala's real successes, while Silas had, rather reluctantly, been given to the two dropouts. Cyala had never expected them to last long, and wasn't going to risk a child with such potential as Daray's on them. Silas's loss would have been acceptable, at the same time he might somehow turn into something interesting. When he'd managed to survive his parent's murder by hiding, and successfully outwitted their killers to escape, at such a young age, Cyala had had no choice but to adopt him – he was of her bloodline and would therefore have the dark angel animagus one day. Silas, running for his life, and fled to his cousin Daray, and the two had managed hold off the attack force sent by the new City Master for three days until the rest of the family, led by Daray's furious parents, had arrived. That he had managed to survive and get himself away had removed all of her annoyance at his existence, and she'd been determined to train him to an acceptable level. Silas's six prisoners were the only demons captured since the fall of the Roman Empire (that had been recorded) and final validation that her choice of him as an addition to her family had been a good one. Cyala had good reason to be so pleased, and Silas must be very relieved that his attempt had worked so well.

"What will be done with them? Rahkesh asked.

"I'm, not sure yet. We're separating them in order to stall any rescue attempt. Tristan will take two and we'll take the others and put them in two locations. For the moment they can just sit. They're still unconscious – Nuri overdid it a bit. Once I have everyone healed we can work out an interrogation plan."

"Were any of your family killed?" Rahkesh asked.

"No. We have some interesting injuries, but everyone will be fine within a week." Cyala said.

Those must have been some interesting injuries to require a week of recovery. Rahkesh thought, wondering what exactly had happened, he'd been a little out of it towards the end. Perhaps Sygra would know. He' d have to ask later. For now it was good to know that they had some prisoners. Maybe they'd be able to confirm Rahkesh and Namach's suspicions about a coming invasion. Not that what the demons had already done _wasn't _an invasion, but there were sure to be worse to come.

"So how exactly is everyone reacting to the news that the demons are invading with actual armies?" Rahkesh asked.

"Not well." Namach said, "not well at all. I haven't heard so much screaming and raging since the start of the First World War. Everyone wants to know what to do, and no one has any answers yet. Your friend Alastor Moody is advising the International Confederation of Wizards as we speak. He's prepared a complete briefing on demonic abilities. Your reports from your time-travel and the report you wrote on what has happened since then is being added in. There's a chance the ICW will want to talk to you. Or at least the Defense Council will."

"Oh no." Rahkesh groaned.

"Don't worry over it. The Council is half advisors, all from Akren, and half representatives from all the nations involved. About half of those representatives are also from Akren. Most likely they'll just ask for more detail so they can work out a more complete report."

"It would be nice if we knew what these demons were fully capable of. I didn't know there were demon sorcerers until now. I though they were all magical." Rahkesh said

"They are." Sharahak said from his place at Namach's feet. "There are several power levels and rankings based upon demon subspecies, training, and natural ability."

Rahkesh turned to look at his old friend. The demon was lying on the floor, watching him. Sharahak was bigger than when he'd last seen him, and he had some new spikes and spines, in addition to a new set of short horns over his eyes. In addition a darker, almost checkered pattern, ran down his sides and over the tops of his wings.

"You've changed a bit."

"I had two more transformation to reach full maturity." Sharahak explained. "I believe Daray only has one to go through."

"How did you get into the demon realm?" Rahkesh asked. It was something he'd been wondering over for weeks. Sharahak looked around, seeing everyone looking to him. Namach inconspicuously turned on a recorder.

"It's a long story." Sharahak said, "but it seems we have time." Rahkesh settled back onto the cushions and Sygra rested her head on his chest as Sharahak began his story.

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-End Chapter 12

I do believe that is the longest battle scene I've ever written. I don't think I'll do that again soon; it's a bit of a strain.

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Well everyone that's going to be the last chapter for a while. The summer field season is here and I'm off to work in the woods. I will have internet access (to read your reviews) but with a six-day work week I may not have much time to write. I'll be back and writing again in August. At this point I'm hoping to set up Voldemort's demise next chapter.

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Please review! I'll try to update over the next two months, but it might be shorter than normal. (hint – reviews encourage writing)

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I bet none of you can guess how Sharahak wound up in the demon realm.

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	13. Chapter 13

Rusty Shakaford – thank you for such a thoughtful review

Squiresboy – Good question, if a person is pregnant when turned into a vampire the child dies. As for the actual turning process, I'll try to find a place to explain that.

Peak of Triumph – oh don't feel guilty for enjoying my work, that's the point of it!

RatherFabulous – thank you for making me laugh so hard I cried. It is an excellent point about Namach

Anita15 – we'll get to Sierra soon enough.

Natasha Kershka – you're asking all the right questions, all of which will be answered. Using bloodmagic on objects is vitally important to the future plot, offensive bloodmagic however might not get a full explanation until Voldemort is dead, but I'll try to mix in some details sooner.

Evergreen Sceptre – Pixie bomb is included in this chapter

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Whew...longest chapter I've ever written, fifteen and a half thousand words. I think I'll keep them shorter from now on, I wrote this in two days and I'm tired.

Instead of writing multiple chapters featuring just Sharahak's life in the demon realm I'm writing this one about how he got there, and giving you details of his life there as the fic goes along. It is a bit slower than my usual writing, more of story telling than anything else.

Chapter 13

X - Sharahak's story – X

Sharahak stretched out across the cool marble floor, careful to keep just out of the sunlight streaming in. The demon rested his head on his front claws and thought for a few moments before he started to speak. The three vampires and one pained mortal waited patiently for the demon to gather his thoughts, and think back over a thousand years. Vampires had memories no better or worse than the average human, unless magically enhanced. Like anyone else they tended to remember the most important things best.

"I'm sure you all want to know how I got into the demon realm, and you want to know what eventually happened to the Chachapoyaro, and you want to know how my life has been these last thousand years. But first I'll have to give you a little background as to how I got into such a situation in the first place. I've been in the demon realm for a little less than a thousand years. A long time, a very long time. Most of my stay is not particularly exciting nor interesting. I will tell you how I got there, and I have been careful these long centuries to learn and memorize everything I could about the demons and their realm, even their history…but I would rather not give a long drawn-out tale of my life there. I would truly prefer to forget most of it.

If I had not enchanted my memory I would not even remember any other languages. As it is I worked out some vampiric mind magics shortly after you returned to your own time, so that I could remember your language. Some of my vampiric magics were left with me even after the body transfer, but most of it was gone. Perhaps with the memories I saved I'll find a way to reconstruct my old powers some day.

To start, I do not know what eventually happened to the Chachapoyaro. I do know that they created magics to seal off their realm from everything else, but I do not know if they ever activated them. When I left they had not, not even when the Inca started causing trouble.

I left the Chachapoyaro two decades after you did. It was not a snap decision, I had been thinking about it for some time, but somehow never got around to actually leaving. The Inca had continued to erode the Chachapoyas empire, and on several occasions the Inca had tried again to attack the hidden magical cities. Every time they had failed miserably.

It was just after the Festival of Magic, you missed it when you were there, it happened every five years during the winter solstice. There were always feasts, and performances and contests of all sorts. That year it had been particularly good. The Xuelhuala always sent in a team to perform their combat demonstrations, and that year's team was the best in living memory. For nearly ten years the Xuelhuala had been bragging up and down the mountains about the new command they were fielding. Well, more specifically, the new General they had just appointed. This time they had found a real star, your friend Nicodemus.

He'd been made a General at 34, possibly one of the youngest ever. During his training the Xuelhuala instructors had picked him as an exceptionally clever fellow. His innovations in tactics had already been implemented with every regiment of city guards and both the warrior cities. He turned into a quiet serene fellow, who became a true hell-fiend on the battlefield. By the time he made General the entire Xuelhuala force was half in love with him.

At every festival Xuelhuala sent some of their warriors to the cities to give demonstrations. That year they had sent Nicodemus and a good portion of his command. The demonstration fighting had been the best anyone could ever remember seeing, and afterwards there was a great party. I had already packed most of my things and was still contemplating when the right time to leave would be, so I left early.

In my rooms I had been studying maps and the journals I kept of my travels, trying to work out some idea of where I was going to go. Every six or seven decades it happens, I get this urge to find someplace different. In those days it wasn't much of a problem. Wandering vampires weren't terribly common – exploring new areas was a good way to die an early death – but there were enough of us about that it wasn't hugely out of place. Wanderers were welcomed almost everywhere and permitted to stay for a decade or so, as long as they were respectful and didn't cause any trouble.

In those days communication was not very advanced, and a wandering vampire could bring news of happenings in other parts of the world. Often when a visitor stopped in a city for a year or two the local vampire population, and often werewolves and humans, would gather to hear what was happening elsewhere.

In addition wanderers picked up immense sets of skills. I've been a carpenter, a blacksmith, a teacher, a vineyard owner, an olive farmer, a canoe maker, a shepherd, a fisherman, a potter, a dye maker, a silk weaver, a pearl diver, and I even spent two decades making papyrus paper. A visitor with such a set of skills was most welcome anywhere in the world. I would often trade techniques with local craftsmen wherever I went. It was a good way to travel. I had been a traveler most of my life, only rarely did I stay anyplace for more than two decades.

I would have walked off into the jungle and headed north – I knew how far south it was possible to go without hitting the sea. But farther north was very much known. Exploring the northern continent had a great appeal to it.

However I could no longer wander as I once had – I was now a demon. Vampires do tend to undergo major lifestyle changes in order to keep up with the times, but most get comfortable with a secure position in a more powerful vampire's territory and are happy to stay forever. If they get bored they can try to move to a new city, or maybe take a decade to go climb the five highest mountains in China. Major changes happen, but they are few, going from vampire wanderer to fugitive demon was something of a higher degree than "major".

I no longer had the freedom to go wherever the wind blew me. I didn't know how demons would be welcomed – I had never met a demon and asked it. I could count on one hand the number of places where I had ever heard them mentioned.

As I was gathering the packs I would put on my two lamas when I left I felt a presence behind me and turned to find Nicodemus standing by the door. I hadn't seen him in over a decade, though I'd heard plenty from the Xuelhuala warriors every time they stopped by the city.

After the three of you left there was a lot of grieving from your friends. Nicodemus was different. He changed the day you left. I never heard him mention any of your names again unless someone specifically asked. He never expressed any sorrow at all. Whenever Xeri or her sister or one of the healers was wondering over what had happened to you he'd just get a very vague look and his voice would get cold, eventually everyone stopped talking about you. It was very strange, Xeri missed all three of you greatly, and so did Kalahimran, our old one-eyed sorcerer. I don't know what Nicodemus felt; he never said a word about it…though one time when I was walking by his rooms shortly after you left I thought I heard weeping.

Now he was standing in the doorway, leaning casually against the doorframe, watching me. As usual I couldn't tell what he was thinking anymore; he'd gotten that way, so that no one could ever tell what was on hid mind, but he looked the perfect image of a Xuelhuala General. Taller and broader than I remembered, solid muscle on a thin wiry frame, heavily armed as they always are. He was wearing that necklace you gave him Rahkesh, the one that was a snake built from copper thread and covered with emerald chips too small to see that created scales. I myself had kept the armband you three had made for me, though I'd had it adjusted to fit my demon form.

"Leaving so soon?" He asked me casually. Fifteen years it had been since we'd last spoken. No "how are you?", no "so what's going on?", like most old friends would ask, more than a decade and that was all he said. I have to say it was a little odd, but I suspect he knew well enough what I'd been doing; everyone knew I would be leaving soon.

"It's time I think." I told him, "In my six hundred years I've seen a lot of places, and I like this one more than most, but it time to move on." He just nodded. Then he pulled out four small paintings. I had never seen three of them before – I know there were several paintings done of us all, but three of these were different.

"Take these with you." Nicodemus told me. "Keep the one you recognize. Give the others to Silas, Daray, and Rahkesh when you meet them, their names are on them." I looked the four paintings over, they were the same size as the ones I knew about, but done by a more skilled hand.

"Does that mean I will be seeing them again?" I asked gently, wondering if perhaps one of the Xuelhuala seers had seen something. Nicodemus just smiled that little enigmatic smile he always got when he wasn't going to answer a question, but knew the answer anyway. I took that to mean that he had some idea that I would indeed see you again.

"Will I see you again?" I asked, and got the same response. And for all the empathic powers I had developed over my six centuries I couldn't read anything from him.

"Be careful Sharahak, demons are not welcomed in most of the world. Look after those paintings, and make sure that they get them." Nicodemus told me. One of his lieutenants came in then to speak to him and he left. I packed the paintings and left Vailape two days later. I never saw him again.

I went north as I had planned to do. I was looking for some sort of civilization, and avoided the many wandering tribes whose territories I crossed. I met no vampires, and sensed little magic. I had left down the eastern side of the mountains, there I went by canoe down the rivers until I reached the sea. From there I followed the coast north. It is always easier to find civilizations along the coast than to search inland.

It was humid and tropical mostly. Many of the species of plant and animal were unknown to me, and I'm sure a human would have found the uncertainty uncomfortable and dangerous. I had been concerned about diseases demons might be susceptible to, but the insects refused to bite me and on the occasions something else did I experienced no ill effects. While I was with the Chachapoyaro we had determined that I could live mostly on meat, but that I did have a need for occasional fruits and vegetables. It was always a bit nerve-wracking when I reached a new place with no familiar plants and had to try different things to find what worked without giving me indigestion. As a vampire I only needed blood; that was much simpler. As I traveled I found that it was easiest to build a small sailboat and stay on the sea as much as possible, well within sight of land. I traveled north along the coast for a bit over two years. I enjoy traveling itself and if I did not make any progress because I had changed course to go up an interesting river it didn't really matter.

In the summer season of the third year after leaving the Chachapoyaro I met another vampire. A youngster of less than a century named Khabane. He'd come from Cairo originally with a group of young vampires. They were interested in the magics of the natives there. The others of his group had fought, died, and in one case simply disappeared, leaving him quite alone. Since I really had nothing else to be doing, and one place was as good as another as far as I was concerned, I took him with me.

Khabane and I sailed up the coast well into the winter months. The water grew very cold and the winds fierce. We stayed off the coast as much as possible. There were a lot of people there, and vampires. I didn't want Khabane near any of them, as young as he was I was concerned over territorial tensions, and I was sure my welcome would not be at all pleasant. Probably I wouldn't even have time to try to explain before I was killed. When I saw stars that I recognized giving me and idea of where we were we sailed away from land to cross the sea.

We came ashore months later on an especially inhospitable pile of rocks along the shore of Britain. It was dark when we made land – Khabane had suffered greatly from the sun during our voyage. Distant lights showed the way to a village of some sort. But we stopped only long enough to gather some supplies before I sent us further north. There was an old recluse I knew up here who was a good friend, and I had thought we would stay with her for a while. Her name was Marielle, and she had joined me briefly for a decade of traveling in Persia back when I had been a young vampire. We kept in touch and while she preferred her isolation to a painful degree she did return to join me every half-century or so for a few years wherever I was going. After a few years of traveling I usually returned with her to her old castle for a year or two before setting off again. Her creator and mine had been sisters when mortal, though they had been turned a decade apart by different vampires.

I found my way to Marielle's old fortress easily enough. There was a very large village around it, and a few other castles. The mortals knew her only as a kind, wealthy woman from a distant land who had inherited the place from her mother (Marielle would switch off with herself every generation or so, so that no one got suspicious). She kept a dozen servants, whom she never fed on, and by being generally pleasant and very much a loner she and the locals got along well enough.

Marielle had originally been born in Britain, a short and cheerful blonde who had a love of languages. Not at all typically vampiric. She spoke both Khabane's native tongues fluently. From her we learned that Khabane's creator was away in Greece and would not be back for several years. Marielle was very excited about the languages I had learned and begged me to stay long enough for her to fully record all of them. Khabane also knew several dialects that she'd never heard. With no other vampires around there were plenty of mortals and no territorial disputes. We both settled in to stay while Marielle worked on her language maps.

Two and a half years after our arrival we received word from a duo of traveling vampires who stayed with us for a few days that Khabane's creator, Corina, was on her way back.

Knowing her route and knowing that the number of muggle vampires was reaching extremely problematic levels, to the point where they had their own loose coalitions that ranged across the country, Khabane and I decided to meet her. She had just reached the northernmost end of Scotland when we set out. Khabane had spent most of the past few years in the castle, and was not at all interested in journeying anywhere. He had spent most of his existence alone and was nervous about venturing anywhere. I thought the trip would do him some good and perhaps restore some of his confidence.

It was summer and the weather was unusually good when Khabane and I arrived at a thriving village along the river Ness, right where it met the sea. Khabane, jumpy and almost panicky around so many people, was not at all comfortable with the place. I located a then-unused fortress, mostly ruined, some distance from the village. Here Khabane seemed much more at ease. I could hardly go into the town, being a demon, so instead I left one night and flew until I felt the presence of another vampire, a magical one.

Corina was Asian, but where from I couldn't tell. I suspect she was of some sort of mixed ancestry, as she had remarkably blue eyes. In any case she must have left that life behind, including her name. She spoke like a Scottish native and after getting over the shock of having a demon drop out of the sky to say hello she was friendly enough. She was also relieved to see her child again. She'd left him for a few decades in Egypt after she'd had to leave during a dispute with another vampire, one who had managed to out fight her. She hadn't even known he'd left, and had assumed him either dead at the hands of the vampire who'd forced her to leave, or living well enough among the vampire community there.

It was a slow journey back to Marielle's fortress. Corina had brought two wagons of books and other things. One of them broke a wheel the first night and we had to stop. While they were fixing it I sensed demons. It was a moonless night with thick mist and I was flying above the other two, scouting for anything unusual. The smell was one I was unfamiliar with, but I knew instinctively that it was a demon. However I could find nothing, and though I flew back and forth all night over the fields and rivers and I could not find a location.

Corina and Khabane stopped early at a town to get a new wheel and have one of the horses looked at as it was going lame. We wound up staying the day and leaving at dusk. That evening Corina and Khabane encountered a large group of mortals, heavily armed, marching down the road. Corina stopped to ask what was going on. Though a little hostile to foreigners she eventually learned that they were going after vampires in an old cave down by the nearby loch.

I rejoined them after dark, having spent the day in some nearby forests keeping out of sight. It was likely that any vampire living in a cave was a non-magic one, and probably very young. Corina had little interest in helping them. I didn't either. But Khabane was interested and wanted to at least check it out. Eventually I remembered the demon I had sensed. Concerned that it might in fact be a demon the mortals were about to encounter I agreed to go and take a look around. Eventually Corina went with us.

What a mistake that was! No sooner had we found the path the mortals had taken than the mortals came running out screaming in terror. They passed us, possibly without even noting my presence. The smell of demons was now thick in the air and I was getting very worried. One I was sure I could handle, or probably even two, but this smelled like it might be more than that.

The hill sloping down to the loch was steep and the trees were young, as though they had been harvested a few years earlier. Hidden in the thick growth were a set of doors in the hillside. They were low, not too far above the water and I'm sure during a flood they would have been swamped. It had probably been some sort of crypt originally, but now there were demons inside. Unsure of how to proceed we stopped outside. Then from behind and above I sensed approaching demons. Looking back I spotted six diving at us from the air, flying in low over the waters of the loch, three struggling people held in their talons. They could fly faster than Corina or Khabane could run so we had to fight. Corina sent Khabane into the trees atop the hill and she and I turned to the incoming demons. As they hit the ground I had a second to recognize that the captives were magical children before they attacked us.

All six were order three set one demons (the listeners blinked a few times but didn't interrupt) I'm a beta demon and had a good advantage. The first one came in too fast – I suppose it wasn't used to carrying a struggling child. I got it down and tore out its throat without much effort. The child fled. I called Khabane to get the children away.

Corina handled two of the demons, putting holes through their wings with a knife before pouring some sort of potion onto one of them and setting it alight with a spoken command. It burned green and smelled atrocious but it worked, that demon's scales were burned off. Corina killed it by severing its spine. I handled the fourth and fifth, tearing them apart. My scales were stronger than theirs of course and though I had some bad scrapes I wasn't really injured.

The sixth demon must have sensed easier prey. It went for Khabane as he tried to get the last child, a little girl with a broken leg, into the cover of the trees. He had a good sword and sliced its wing open before its claws tore into him. Corina broke its other wing with a spell. As she attacked it I heard movement inside the old crypt. Four demons came out, larger and stronger. The first tackled me before I could fully turn around. I tore its hip muscles but my wings were sliced up.

The other three went right for Corina and Khabane. I don't really know what happened but one of them managed to hurt Corina bad. Probably broke her leg. She did manage to kill it but the others got Khabane and the children. They dragged them into the crypt. I shoved the demon on me away and dove after them, it came in behind me and shut the doors.

I don't know what I expected to find. But inside the cave was enormous. The tunnel sloped down until I was sure we must be well below the water. It was cold and the walls were wet with water seeping down from the loch above. The main cavern was immense. Big enough that I had trouble finding the other side. It was part flooded, perhaps it had originally been an underwater cave, and on a raised potion by the water's edge there was a huge circular portal. I had never seen one of the portal altars, apart from the one that had brought the demon whose body I now have. This one was big enough to sail a boat through.

The remains of what must have been two score of mortals were draped about in various pieces. The water of the massive pool was covered in a layer of blood from the corpses. The portal was open and glowing. I could almost look down into it and seen the twin portal in the demon realm. The tunnel between was dark red. And filled with blood and water.

Khabane put up a hell of a fight. I believe he managed to take and eye out of one of them before they pushed him through the portal. It burst into flame as he went in. The children were screaming and crying, they were running in every direction. Eventually the demons grabbed them and jumped through with them. I sensed the one behind me catching up. I was at the entrance to the main cavern and the passage behind me was narrow. I stopped and he ran straight onto my tail spike, impaling himself.

I ran to the portal, it was flaming and I couldn't see anything through the fire and boiling blood. I tried shouting but I didn't hear anything, not even an echo. Corina came in then, she must have forced the door open. She was limping and her back was ripped apart. Reaching into the portal, burning her arms, she tried to call Khabane through their connection. But there was no response.

It was then that I noticed a slick track leading from the portal into the water. A wide wet trail like that made by enormous snake, or maybe a whale, moving across the floor. I called Corina and began backing off. The demons had brought something else through that portal, and it was now in the water.

We were halfway across the cavern and starting to run when a dark mass appeared in the blood-soaked waters, coming down from the loch above and up through an underwater passage. The water in the pool broke and a sea demon lunged out. I'd never seen anything like it, sleek and skinny, no scales at all. It had a long thick neck, heavy but streamlined body and big powerful flippers, all dark grey. It had a ridge of spines down its back and its head was covered in small sharp horns.

It was easily bigger than many dragons. Its jaws snapped around Corina and bit her in half. As it swept up out of the pool I was wrapped in a neck coil. I clawed at it and breathed fire, but its skin was fire resistant and very strong. I bit it and poured venom onto it. This hurt it, burning the skin badly and it dropped me, right into the portal. I tried to spread my wings to stop myself by they weren't big enough and were already damaged, I went right through."

Sharahak stopped for a few moments. Thinking, then he continued. "I haven't been back to this world since then. I didn't carry many possessions but what I had was at Marielle's fortress, including the painting Nicodemus gave me. However I had the other three, and have been keeping them ever since.

I never did find out what became of Khabane, I hope he died quickly. I searched for centuries for any sign of him, but I never found anything. Nor did I ever find the children. By the time I went through the demons had taken them away.

When I appeared out of the portal they didn't know what to do. Of the other demons only one survived the journey back. The rest were too badly injured. That one had come to the battle late and hadn't seen much. I was injured and barely survived the trip between realms myself. I had several broken ribs, both wings were slashed and my sides had gashes in them. I was able to fake being dazed and ill for two days. Since the one surviving demon was unconscious he couldn't say anything else.

I must say I am a good actor. I was able to act confused and helpless enough not to frighten anyone. I told them I had lived all my life in a cell. I knew nothing of the world. I didn't know what the ocean was, I didn't know what trees were, I barely knew what fire was. I had been a prisoner my entire life. I said that I was being transported to another cell when the group had been attacked first by vampires and then by mortals. When we had stumbled onto the cavern and portal there were only two guards left. I acted like I had never seen another demon before. I said I had been told I was a deformed vampire. It had been long enough since the demons that had been summoned by the Inca had vanished that no one made any connection. The demon realm is a big place and I never met any relatives of the demon whose body I had. Demons aren't raised by their parents you see, so no one noticed anything.

Not knowing how to get back, and with the demon sorcerers doubtful that I would survive the journey I managed to make a place for myself there. Any strangeness on my part was easy to pass of to having spent my entire life since hatching (demons lay eggs) in the same tiny cell.

I soon learned just how terrible a place the demon realm is. On my second day there they tried to serve me a roasted human toddler as lunch. You really can't have any idea how awful a place it is unless you've been there. The entire society is supported by slave labor. Many humans not magically powerful enough or strong enough are turned into werewolves or vampires to increase their use. Those that are satisfactory are kept as breeders. The average lifespan is very short. They kill humans for fun and call it a sport. They make games of letting humans loose into pens and killing them with spears, points awarded for the "art" involved.

I really can't tell you how glad I am to be out of there. When I heard your call Rahkesh, I recognized it at once, and thought that, even if I didn't survive the journey back it was better than staying there."

Sharahak fell silent, waiting, and looking around at all of them while the group absorbed what he'd just heard.

"I met Corina once, but none of the others are familiar." Namach finally said. "I'd have to check my files to find out about her, but I don't suppose it matters if she's been dead so long."

"That looks like a nasty scar," Rahkesh said softly, nodding to a long pinkish white seamed gash running right down the middle of Sharahak's chest. "Do the demons fight so much?"

Sharahak didn't answer for a moment. He went very, very still, not even breathing. Rahkesh focused on his face and saw his eyes had gone all hollow and dead looking. Then he glanced down and saw Sharahak's claws were gouging into the floor with the pressure he was putting on them.

"No. No they don't. I got that before entering the demon realm." Sharahak finally replied. Tense and his voice flat. Rahkesh glanced over at the others to see if they noticed the change in Sharahak as well. Whatever the story behind that wound was it still haunted the demon.

"How?" Namach asked gently. Rahkesh sensed a brief change and realized that the ancient must be projecting a calming influence. Sharahak, quite possibly unaware of it, given that his eyes were fixed on the floor as he recalled unpleasant memories, visibly relaxed a little.

"It is not particularly important." Sharahak finally said. The group traded looks silently, wondering if they should push the question. Rahkesh, deciding that if it was still troubling Sharahak, and since the demon probably hadn't talked about it with anyone else, then they should ask, went to speak, but Namach beat him to it.

"Does it involve a group of young vampires who set out from Cairo for South America about one thousand and fifty years ago?" Namach suddenly asked. Sharahak's ears flattened back and his horns shifted while his wings went flatter.

"I'm guessing it is a rather painful story. All the same, as I'm sure one as old as you well knows, you will probably rest easier for the telling." Namach said softly.

"How do you know about them?" Sharahak asked finally, glancing up at the other ancient.

"They were using a boat a friend of mine gave them. The eldest, a vampire named Dersis, I had known for a century. One of the few muggle vampires who survived and did well." Namach said.

"Oh." Sharahak shifted uneasily. Rahkesh abruptly got the feeling that he was now even more reluctant to begin. "I suppose then…you ought to know." Sharahak sighed. Then Sharahak shook his head around, rattling the guard hairs on his neck, and began to speak.

"During the early summer season of the third year after I left the Chachapoyaro I sailed further from land than normal to avoid some dangerous looking reefs. Once beyond them I reached out magically and felt the wind. A storm was coming, a big one. I would have to get back to land within a few hours. My demon senses grimaced away from weather-observing magic, and my vampiric magics felt the tingle in the air of the approaching gale. Farther than I normally went I caught sight of land on the horizon and went to investigate. It was an island. Not a terribly large one, but certainly large enough for a decent population to live there. Flocks of birds were flying around the edges in groups so thick that the trees bent under their weight and you couldn't see the leave for all the feathers. I could guess that a demon would immediately be hunted down and killed by mortals, but here I could sense a vampiric presence. I circled the island by boat, on the southern end there was a rocky spit of land encrusted with jewel-green trees and trailing vines, and atop that was a small castle. Built with high walls and four towers it looked completely out of place. I anchored below a cliff and flew up. The coming storm was just visible on the horizon, a wave of black ominous-looking clouds. I could probably make the mainland before it hit, if I left the boat and flew back. But since I was there I wanted to meet the local vampires, since I probably did not know them.

On top the castle walls extended far away from the four towers overlooking the ocean, encircling a sizable piece of land. I scented mortals down the other end of the island, but the vampiric presence came from the castle. My own magics felt more demon than vampire, but I sent out a signal anyway, announcing myself magically. I tried to make it as much like my former vampiric magic as possible, to conceal the demon magic for a while.

I was surprised at the response. As soon as I had let my magic go I received a wave of intense magic, that wasn't entirely controlled. It felt young, very young, and not at all well trained. It was definitely a young male vampire, but his powers seemed highly unusual. There was no danger I could sense, merely a cautious greeting. I focused on that a returned with my greeting, and my name.

One advantage of being a wandering vampire was getting to meet so many others of my kind. The response from within the castle was a sharp welcome, and a flicker of recognition of my name. Followed by anther name, Funar, son of Dersis. That last was a name I knew. Dersis had been another wanderer whom I had joined for about a century during my travels in China. He had been turned by his creator in Egypt, though he'd been born someplace else, and like myself had wanted to see other parts of the world. He had later gone to India while I went further north. He'd been a pleasant enough traveling companion, and a good ally to have at your back in a fight."

Sharahak paused and glanced up at Namach again, but the ancient's face was unreadable and he returned to his tale.

"Funar met me by the solid wooden gates. My speculations on his age had been correct; he was a very young vampire, not more than sixty. He appeared to be from someplace in southern Africa and walked with an odd forward tilt to his body, as though his spine wasn't quite right. Such problems are usually corrected for during the vampiric transformation, but perhaps his had originally been especially severe. I must have shocked him horribly with my appearance as he did a double-take so fast he slammed his head on the doors.

"Sorry about that. I got transferred into the body of a demon a little while back." I told him, speaking slowly and carefully in ancient Egyptian – it was a common enough language for a vampire from Africa to know because it was still used in so many spells. The poor fellow was shaking and looked terrified enough to faint. "Is Dersis still around then?" That seemed to steady him, for a moment.

"No. Died in Egypt. Are you really Sharahak?" By the time he'd answered my question he'd recovered from his shock to ask one of his own. Dersis must have taught him how to work under pressure; nothing had ever fazed Dersis for more than a moment

"Yes."

"He said you were a vampire."

"I was."

He stopped for a moment and stared hard at me, before finally nodding a little and backing up. I was a bit surprised at his apparent trust. A demon who was formerly a vampire, friend of his creator or not, is highly suspicious.

"Dersis said if I ever met you to ask if you still had the gift he gave you when you parted ways." Funar said slowly. I sensed magic stirring around me, whatever his lack of training Funar did have some powerful wards around this place. I pulled the small book out of my pack and handed it to him. It had Dersis name, done in blood ink, on the cover. Funar smelled it without opening it, and handed it back.

"_Was_ a vampire?"

"I crossed paths with a demon. It didn't end well." I replied dryly, "I got stuck in its body, however given that the demon died I'd say I got the better deal."

"Dersis also said interesting things tended to happen to you." Funar said, "I see he was right." He turned, apparently unconcerned that I might attack, and led the way inside. I decided I liked Dersis son already, the youngster had his sire's attitude copied perfectly, even if there was something just a little...off…about him. He was concealing his scent, and he seemed just a bit odd in a way I couldn't really place. I was so new to using a demon's senses that I didn't question this any.

Inside Funar kept extensive gardens and orchards, along with what was an apparently flightless flamingo and a few parrots. The place was well maintained and the building attached to the four towers was of solid rock and very sturdy. However it seemed that Funar lived alone, there was no sign of any other vampires or mortal humans. I had to wonder if the humans down the other end of the island even knew he was here.

"Do you live alone? This place looks like it would have taken at least a dozen vampires to build." I asked him, Funar turned with a strange unreadable look.

"There were five of us. The others left a while back."

"Their loss, this is a nice part of the world." I said. Apparently that was the wrong thing to say as Funar's back tensed up and he nodded sharply.

"When did Dersis die?" I asked curiously.

"A while ago. I was about twenty." Funar said.

Inside the castle was a bit dark and damp, the doors were small and I had to be careful not to catch my wings, but it was cool and out of the scorching sunlight. Funar gave a sigh of relief once inside. At his age his resistance to sunlight was very limited. Demon's weren't too keen on sunlight, but I still had enough of the vampire left that it was as bad. But vampires didn't enjoy sunlight either and I was grateful for the dark.

"It'll get easier to stay outside at midday when you past one hundred and fifty." I told him, judging based on what I could feel of his magic it would take about that long until he could stand more than a half-day's worth of exposure without harm.

"Yeah." Funar said, shaking his head around oddly.

"Would you mind if I stayed while the storm passes?" I asked.

"Stay as long as you like." Funar said, "When did you cross the ocean? Dersis said he left you in China."

"A little less than a century ago." I replied. The castle might be well built, but the walls contained only a few hangings and pictures, not enough lights of any sort, and it smelled of containment magics. I was curious about that, the containment magics were strong, and centered on the level below the ground level.

Funar led me through a large central hall and into a smaller set of room off of it. These must be where he primarily lived. There were more wall hangings, more torches along the walls and a few sets of tables and chairs. Off to one side was a sizeable sitting room with couches. Funar opened a large desk and removed a sturdy square piece of wood with finely done etchings on it. He traced one with his finger and spells appeared over the windows, a pale blue, and not particularly well done, covering to stop the wind and rain for the storm.

"I assume you have a boat?" He asked, "or did you fly here?" He looked my wings over, since I was walking upright, not entirely comfortable, my wings framed my whole body.

"Below the cliffs, it's enchanted enough to withstand this." I said. Letting Funar know indirectly that I was better at enchantments than he was, though I was sure he'd already guessed I was much more powerful. Funar nodded and moved to light a few more torches as the dark clouds rolled over us. I felt the smell of the containment wards below us recede somewhat, as if an attempt was being made to hide them. Now I was very curious.

"Are there lower levels to this castle?"

"Certainly, several actually." Funar said. He stepped into a side room and came back with a large bottle of blood. Taking a pair of gold and sapphire goblets from a shelf he poured and offered me one. "You do still drink blood don't you?"

"Yes. However since my species change I need other things as well. It is a little uncomfortable to have to think of food after so long living on blood. Fortunately I can survive only on blood for several days." I explained. The blood was not mortal, which was unusual, almost nobody bothered bottling other stuff. But there must be a very limited number of mortals on the island so it made sense. I didn't recognize the animal, it was much sweeter than anything I had tasted before.

"The rock here is very sturdy, it must have been difficult to work it."

"Magic," Funar said appreciatively, "makes everything possible."

It was then that I noticed that although the blood was very sweet, it left an unpleasant aftertaste. It was also an aftertaste I remembered well – a sleeping potion, one of the few that remained complete when immersed in blood.

"Funar…" I gasped, my demon senses shutting down. Funar rose, his grin turning cold and his eyes getting glazed.

I passed out.

When I awoke I had a pounding headache – demons may be susceptible to some sleeping potions but they don't react well to them. I was also shackled to a wall, in a very dark, cold and damp cell. The chains were heavy and black, there were no windows, it was so dark I could barely see the heavy iron door. I shifted about, and then yanked hard on my shackles, and was surprised when they didn't break. I may be a demon but I was a strong one, perhaps because of my remnant vampiric abilities, such as they were. The chains, I noticed on closer inspection, had runes carved on them. I would not be getting out by brute force.

There was someone else in the cell. Despite my aching head I could sense another presence. Several other presences. Vampires, young ones. I blinked until my vision returned, slowly, and looked around. There were four of them, chained as I was to the stone walls. But they were in far worse condition.

The one immediately to my left was a tall male. Both of his hands were missing all the flesh – leaving only bones that dangled uselessly. No blood flowed from the wounds, but they were not visibly healing either. He blinked at me dully, his eyes glazed and uncomprehending. Horrified I looked to the next, a female. Long strips of skin hung off her body as if someone had tried to skin her alive, but hadn't removed the skin when done. She hung from her shackles, motionless and, mercifully, unconscious.

On my other side was a smaller male whose face bore a striking resemblance to Funar's. His left leg, the one closest to me, was missing all the flesh, like the vampire on my left's hands. Just bones held together tenuously by the joints and magic. On the hip bone slices were missing, as if they had been chiseled off. Past him was another vampire, a tortured wreck of a being who's chest cavity hung open, his ribs cut out, his lungs visible.

None of them spoke, the one with the ruined hands had drifted off into a sort of semi-conscious state, and did not acknowledge me when I rattled my chains or called to him. Not one of them was over eighty, and the magics from them were so weak I was amazed they still lived at all. Their skin, what remained of it, was shrunken and had a desiccated look like a dried corpse. All were too pale, their veins non-existent from lack of blood. It must have been many months since they'd fed.

The heavy door opened and Funar walked in. The one on my left gave a little strangled moan as he walked into the room and grinned at me. His eyes had an insane shine to them and were overly wide.

"Getting along with your new friends?"

"Funar? What the hell is this?" I asked. As I did I lowered my pulse, shielded my magics, and slowly blocked off my scent. I was not going to let him know I was terrified.

"This!" Funar waved his arms about. "Or rather _they_ are my little projects. Beautiful no?"

"What?" I asked. Funar looked disappointed. Then his eyes lit up and his grin widened, twisting his face grotesquely.

"You were a vampire. You got out of it." He whispered, approaching closer. With him so close I sniffed the air. His scent was off. It was unstable and fluctuating wildly. His eyes seemed unsteady, as if they were vibrating just a bit. Funar, I realized, was completely insane.

"I'm a demon now."

"Precisely. And I too am going to get out of it." Funar said too loudly. The vampire hanging on my right twitched and winced.

"Get out of it?" I asked, still puzzled, or maybe my brain hadn't recovered from the drugs. Funar's grin vanished and his face got cold and furious. His fists clenched and he leaned forward into my face.

"OF BEING A VAMPIRE YOU IDIOT!" He screamed at me. One of the others whimpered. Funar's voice lowered and changed, higher pitched now. "And these fine fellow are going to show me how!" He grinned brightly. "You see? I will be free! Immortal and mortal at the same time!" He giggled. "that old fool never saw it coming. No, no he didn't. Turned me he did. And now I'm a vampire and immortal now, and soon I'll be mortal _and_ immortal. I'll beat them all in both worlds. No, no, no one would ever imagine old Funar'd find the way!"

"Funar…that's impossible." I said softly. Funar swung around, shrieking, and clubbed me over the head. I blacked out again.

When I awoke I was chained to an old table in the center of the room. My wings forced flat against the wood. My wings were certainly capable of flattening, but only in the right position, and the strain of muscles twisted the wrong way had woken me with pulses of agony. The table was covered in a thick layer of old blood. Vampire blood. The shackles must have been enchanted; I couldn't even move my tail. Then Funar showed up with the knife.

I'm not going to give you all the details of what happened over the next few days, just the facts. I don't care to remember it, and truthfully I have intentionally forgotten most of it, else I would never sleep again for the nightmares. Over the next several hours he carefully dissected me. Being both vampire and demon I was immortal, and so I could not die. By the time he tired of taking notes and examining the way my heart – cut open so he could see it – beat, I had forced myself to faint. I awoke chained to the wall again with the others. My whole body hurt and for a moment I thought I would faint again from the pain. My body, which had tried to heal for the first few hours, had given out sometime halfway through Funar's work, and most of my injuries remained open. I had never felt such agony in my life, and being unable to move at all only made it worse.

When I awoke in the cell I looked around at the others. This time the one on my right was awake. His hip bone was showing signs of healing, a little. His glazed and unfocused eyes rolled around to meet mine.

"Who are you?" I asked slowly, speaking ancient Egyptian on a hunch. The pained eyes slowly focused a little.

"Khabane." His voice was scratchy and hoarse, probably from screaming, or not being used at all.

Funar returned within two days. This time he removed the one on my left. He didn't bring him back. Or, rather, he brought by his skeleton, neatly preserved in a glass container. He left it in the corner. Why the vampire didn't disintegrated to dust like all vampires do when dead I didn't know, until I realized that at some level the poor creature must still be alive, in some way. Unable to heal, and somehow unable to die.

Funar came back minutes after leaving the skeleton in its container. He walked into the room and stopped dead, staring at the skeleton.

"What? How?" He whirled around. "WHAT DID YOU DO?" He screamed, throwing me against the wall.

"I didn't!"

"THAT!" Funar screamed, pointing at the skeleton. "YOU FOOL I WASN'T DONE WITH HIM YET!"

As I tried to puzzle out what Funar meant I realized that he might genuinely not remember what he had done to the other vampire.

"I didn't. You did. Just a few minutes ago."

"Did I really? Hmm? Ooohh it is pretty." Funar said admiringly, his whole demeanor changing so abruptly I wondered if perhaps he had multiple personalities. He moved around the container, touching it lovingly, then nodded, pleased, and left again. He was back with a wheeled table minutes later. This time he took the female, after he had left I managed to rouse Khabane, who seemed to somehow still have a working mind, to answer some questions.

Funar and Khabane, it turned out, had been half-brothers as mortals. Khabane had been turned by a friend of Dersis, while Dersis turned Funar. Funar had started acting oddly shortly after. He'd convinced Dersis, who was always ready to travel, to come here, far from Egypt. Dersis had two creators, one in Egypt and another far north in an unknown location. Here Funar was well away from both, and Dersis was not powerful enough to send a message so far. Khabane's creator had been in Britain when they left, and Khabane didn't have a fraction of the training or power to call to her.

Funar had gathered five other young vampires, all of whom were magical, and persuaded them to come along. With Khabane and Dersis there were eight total, enough to look after each other and few enough to not be terribly problematic if prey proved scarce or if the local vampires had expanded. Dersis had thought it a splendid idea to take along a group for travels on a few continents he'd never seen. There were certainly vampires over here, but it had been many centuries since anyone had come from across the sea to tell of what was happening in far off lands. It was generally agreed at a meeting in Cairo to send a small expedition, and they had left with the gift of a large and extremely well-built ship plus plenty of supplies from several other vampires. Dersis had not been magical before being turned, but he was eight hundred and knew the world well. He'd never gotten into any serious trouble he couldn't get out of, and the local magical vampires were not at all sad to be rid of him and a small crew of younger vampires – there were a few too many about anyway, there always are. And the vampiric presence across the sea had always been low. Dersis and his crew would find no trouble setting up working territories and settling down. They were going to find what magics existed over here, with the nonmagical Dersis acting as an advisor to the group of young scholars. His job was to help with interactions with natives. Dersis got along well with everybody; I had once seen him charm a cannibal tribe set on burning him alive into being his best friends.

Funar, however, went round the bend shortly after arriving. He stayed alone in his cabin on the ship, never came out. By the time they made land he was acting erratically, friendly than mean, cheerful than furious. Dersis vanished one night and was never seen again. Within two days Funar had killed the only other one capable of stopping him by first crushing her in a rockslide and then drinking her blood. He'd tricked the others into drinking a potion that had been heavily laced with poisons. They had awoken in a basement of their fortress that they didn't even know existed.

Then the horrors started. Funar was convinced that in order to become mortal again all he had to do was study vampires. Unfortunately he was also insane. He took them apart and recorded every bit of data he could think of, certain that the secret could be found through the careful examination of the vampiric body. However, because he was also insane he thought his work was fun, and frequently did things like dripping acid in their eyes just because he felt like it. The vampire on Khabane's right had been lobotomized while Funar studied his brain, half his skull was missing. Khabane was being used for bone and flesh samples – which Funar was _eating_ hoping the "powers" in it would make him mortal again.

I had never heard of any vampire ever turning cannibalistic. How one could eat what is essentially dead reanimated flesh without getting ill I don't understand at all. Khabane told me that, as the years passed and his studies gave him no answers, Funar was becoming more and more unstable. Now with me he was disposing on some of the other vampires, who wouldn't last much longer anyway.

Khabane was right, within six days he and I were the only ones left. What happened to the other two I never knew, but soon it was me and Khabane, with that grisly skeleton. Eventually it died and disintegrated, sending Funar into such a fury that he broke both my legs. Apparently he had been hoping to study the process of recovery by giving it blood. What he was hoping to learn from that I'm not sure.

Funar vanished then for several days – I don't really know how long, it was hard to gauge time when in complete darkness and with my internal rhythms shaky from torture. While he was gone I worked on my shackles. I may have never encountered a completely mad vampire before, but I had been in bad situation several times, and at one point I had thought it prudent to learn how to pick locks. Funar's chains were locked with devices I was unfamiliar with, but even with all their enchantments the metal itself wasn't too sturdy. And Funar had not disabled my hands any. Nor did he know anything about a demon's venoms, and he hadn't tried to learn. I was able to partially dissolve away the inside of the locks with a saliva and venom mixture.

After a few days of dissolving I waited until I felt that it was probably nearly morning, and heated the metal by breathing fire onto it. With the metal hot I added another dose of venom, and pulled the lock apart. Freeing Khabane was even easier, Funar kept the keys hanging on one wall. Khabane was in poor condition, he was far too young to go without blood for more than a day with serious repercussions. I had thought that I would have to carry him out since I wasn't about to leave him there. But he struggled onto his remaining leg and, with an arm over my wing joint, limped out on his own well enough.

Neither of us knew the way out, but by listening to Funar's footsteps every time he came to visit us I had the idea that we needed to go right, then up some stairs. The stairs gave Khabane a lot of trouble, but at the top we arrived at a place he recognized and with a little difficulty he recalled the way to the only door. The sun was about to rise and I hoped to get to land before it did. Funar could barely travel in sunlight, and would have a lot of trouble getting to the mainland. If we got there first we would have a head start and I would have time to rest and look after Khabane.

I didn't recognize Funar's wards; somehow we must have triggered them. We were almost at the front gates when he came charging out of the castle screaming. I pushed Khabane against the wall and sent him towards the door, not that he could move much on his own, and turned to face Funar.

During the last few days I had mostly healed, and despite being weak and ill-feeling I was just over six hundred, far better trained and much more powerful, easily more than a match for him. I don't suppose he had enough of a mind left to think of that before challenging me. With the sleeping potion he had caught me by surprise, and with a demon's taste buds – which differ greatly from a vampire's – I hadn't recognized it. Now he had no advantage. I let him catch up and when he leaped at me I simply ducked his strikes and let him move past, reaching down I grabbed a leg and flipped him over my right hip, slicing his throat with my wing talons and impaling him on my tail. It was really very simple. I'm sure Dersis had taught him to fight better than that, but I guess in his madness he didn't remember any of it.

I wasn't about to drink his blood, so I burned him instead. His wards protested fiercely, feeding him strength and draining my magic. But a demon's fire has little to do with magic. It took a wile, but I was in a hurry so I didn't stop to exact some revenge. I burned him to an ash, killing him, and his remains blew away on the light breeze. The sun was rising and I didn't care to wait around, surely Khabane would die when the dawn hit, he didn't have the strength for it now. I grabbed him and took to the air, flying for the mainland.

The wind was in our favor and we got there just before the sun's first rays crossed the horizon. I got Khabane into the forest and down under some thick trees and a blanket of moss to wait out the day. He was unconscious from the sleep the dawn brings to vampires. Deciding he was safe enough for the day I left to find a few animals for him and food for myself.

I destroyed the castle over the next week. Not wanting to stay on that island I lived on the mainland, and sailed or flew out every day. The wards had died with their insane creator and it was a simple matter to dismantle the stone with magic and turn it into an enormous pile of rock. I cut the blocks magically so that they didn't appear to be man-made and fused them with the bedrock, piling soil onto and planting it. The dead remained beneath it all – I burned the skeletons to ash and dropped the metal shackles into the sea.

While I worked on erasing all signs of Funar's presence Khabane remained on the mainland, refusing to return to the island. Our flight from the cell had taken any remaining strength he had and his body and magic simply gave out under the strain. For three days he remained unconscious, except for screaming nightmares that sent tears of blood raining from his closed eyes. I brought him animal blood and forced him to drink it. On the third day he woke, but refused to speak. On the fourth I woke to find him up and staring out at the sea. By the time I had finished my work on Funar's island Khabane was healed enough to get about on his own. He went for long walks on the beach almost every day, staring off into the sky. I don't know what he was like before his imprisonment, but it was clear that though he had survived his mind had not entirely gotten through without some painful scars. His eyes kept a glassy look and he would frequently stumble a bit as he walked, as though his mind and feet were not quite connected right. In addition while his wounds healed he developed a slight limp in his left leg. Perhaps had he been older the damage would not have been so severe or so permanent, but Khabane was very young and the continuous damage for nearly fifty years had overcome even his vampiric healing abilities.

On the eighth day after Funar's death Khabane walked back into our camp late in the evening, well after sunset. He was more alive than I'd ever seen him; his eyes had lost the glazed sheen brought on by too much torture. He sat down across the fire from me, without having to be told, another sign that he was recovering.

"Where will you go now?" he asked.

"You said your creator was across the sea. I am a wanderer Khabane, one place is as good as another. I thought perhaps it was time you returned home." I told him. This vampire was far too young to be alone in the world, and I, being a demon, certainly couldn't look after him. And he did indeed need someone to look after him, for at least the next century. Without anyone to talk to or to help him absorb the horrors of the last fifty years or so he would most likely go insane and turn into so wild creature that would eventually need to be killed. I hoped Khabane's creator had cared for her child enough to help him through this, if not she would undoubtedly kill him.

We can't possibly sail that far in that little boat." Khabane said dejectedly.

"Of course not. We're going to build a bigger one."

"You know how?"

"Khabane, I am a wanderer, we pick up all sets of skills." I told him. Khabane looked up, and grinned like the sun rising.

"When do we start?

Seven weeks later I felt the ship we had built was good enough to start out in. I had crossed the ocean in the opposite direction in a canoe barely big enough for four people to sit in, and so the sailboat we had built seemed a luxury. It was easily big enough to put several horses on without sinking or feeling crowded. However the oceans were rough and our little craft was a bit delicate. I was unfamiliar with the local woods and had spent days selecting trees that seemed good for boat building. Eventually I had settled on using a trimaran, two long pieces, maybe five times as long as I was tall. The middle was a center boat with a deep keel that was several meters longer. Two tall (sort of) masts and one smaller one. It wasn't the most maneuverable boat I had ever built, nor the fastest. But it could carry cargo well enough and with all that hull space I had plenty of room to try placing enchantments, which largely failed since a good portion of my vampiric magics had not transferred to my demon body in any usable fashion. It also provided separate quarters on each outside boat, if we wished. This was essential in my planning. Khabane was still not fully functional, for all his enthusiasm in helping me he rarely said a full sentence a day. He still spent long parts of every night walking the beach alone, and I hoped that between the three boats he would have space to get away if he felt the need for that isolation. We covered over all the boats with thick reeds woven into mats to keep off the sunlight.

As I said, we traveled north. Khabane was largely silent, except to mention interesting plants or animals every once in a while. During daylight we would either anchor and remain under the coverings over the boat, or go ashore and into the forest. By the time we reached Britain Khabane had become a good sailor and his nightmares, when they occurred, were less intense.

Once at Marielle's fortress Khabane recovered slowly, but I soon decided that bringing him here had been the best thing I could have done. It seemed that speaking his native languages helped him to recover faster than I had thought he possibly could. Perhaps good memories of past times were replacing the more recent horrors. He enjoyed working with Marielle to document the languages he spoke, it was the first time I had ever seen him discuss anything at length or get enthusiastic about a subject. By the time we left to meet his creator, Corina, he was mostly functional, though he was still excessively cautious and somewhat timid.

I don't know what happened to him, I hope he didn't suffer long. Through the centuries I looked for him I never found any record of him in the demon realm. Perhaps it was the disorganization when I came through the portal, but the only records said the prisoners had been taken to cells. I hope he died on the way through the portal. After all he'd been through to wind up in the demon realm, an even worse place, would probably had driven him mad.

As for Dersis…I suspect Funar found a way to kill him. Though I don't know how he possibly could have. He may have been insane but he was perfectly capable of making a plan and following through."

Sharahak looked up at the group that had sat silently throughout is tale. The demon's pale eyes watching them as they absorbed what they had just learned. He lifted his tail and wrapped it around him, about halfway down where the spikes stopped, there were several very large plate-like scales. Sharahak shifted the scales so they stood on end, razor sharp edges pointing outwards. From underneath the scales he removed three rolls of thick cloth and handed them to Rahkesh and Daray. The third he gave to Cyala.

"That one is for Silas." He told her.

Daray opened his at once, activating it with a drop of blood. A wooden frame shimmered into existence, stretching out the painting over it. The image was one of Daray and Satan, sitting on one of the vine-covered jungle ridge tops just after sunset. The vampire bat was in his larger variation, though he still seemed small next to Daray's arching black wings.

Rahkesh tucked his into a hidden pocket in his boot, he'd open it later.

"You know every variety of demon?" Namach finally asked. Apparently if he had any further questions about Dersis or the other young vampires he was not going to ask right then. Information on the demons was more important.

"Yes." Sharahak said.

"This sea demon you encountered. That description sounds familiar." Rahkesh said slowly, his pained brain not quite making all the right connections.

Daray snorted "I bet it does. It's the Loch Ness monster. Right location, right description, plausible time frame."

Rahkesh blinked for a moment, his brain going into overdrive. Oh this was not good.

"Those things are sea demons? But they exist all over the world! The Atlantic population has an annual migration of three hundred and fifty of them!" He finally realized, remembering Hermione's ecstatic descriptions of seeing them once with her parents. Luna's dad had done a piece on them and how harmless they were.

"Wait, wait. There are a lot of them?" Sharahak asked, looking seriously concerned.

"Have been since about the six century. No one ever saw them before that. Worldwide population is a couple thousand." Namach said slowly. "How interesting. You never heard of this in the demon realm?"

"No, but I've read the histories. There were three score who were sent to this world during the fifth century." Sharahak said. "As far as I know no one checked up on them, except to send a few more through, when I found them they were adding some more. It was a tactical military move."

"To set up a large population of potential allies that no one would suspect." Cyala said softly. "How intelligent are they?"

"Well there are several variety. The arch, alpha and beta sea demons are less intelligent than you or I, but not by much." Sharahak said. "The lowest rank is almost mindless, but they have an instinctive compulsion to obey the higher order demons."

Namach and Cyala shared and look and some sort of telecommunication. Then Namach nodded slowly.

"We will, of course, have to remedy this situation. Shipping is or major economic importance to all nations. The trade in potions goods alone is worth billions. But in a moment. When this war fully starts will you be leaving that realm and returning to this one?" Namach asked.

"I don't plan on ever going back." Sharahak replied. "I may have been there a long time but I've never learned to like it. I'm afraid many of them don't think much of me anyway, I'm much too kind to my slaves and I refuse to eat them. I'd rather stay here. I know a demon isn't exactly welcome anywhere, but all the same I'd prefer to stay."

"I think you'll find times have changed a bit since you left." Namach said, "If you wish we could arrange for a full story in ever newspaper in the world of what happened to you. Every magical being that can read any language would know within a few days."

"What's a newspaper?" Sharahak asked curiously. "I had thought perhaps many of the world's scholars would want to analyze demon society, but how could you possibly contact everyone in the world?"

Namach chuckled, "perhaps you will find it easier to treat this world as you would an entirely new society. The differences are that immense. We will need everything you know about demons, but first I think it would help to spend a day or two giving you a review of the world as it is now." The ancient turned to Daray, "given the potions you've been taking it would be best to wait for four or five days to complete your transformation. It would also be good if you had a few days to adjust before returning to Akren. I'll send us back in time another four days to give you seven total. Once we're back in the proper time we might not have long until the demons attack again."

"We might. Depends entirely on what our little messengers of death found when they went through." Cyala said. "If they made a dent in the demon forces they might take a bit to get another force organized."

"What?" Rahkesh asked.

"The pixies." Daray said. "Norovosi sent them through as Sharahak came out. Demons already lost the battle and now they're in for a rather nasty few days in their realm, until they can catch and kill all the pixies. And you can bet that will take a while."

"Perhaps. That depends on their sorcerers I believe. However, we can hope that those pixies and the Heartsfail have bought us some time to prepare as well as possible. Well, we'll have a week for you Daray to transform and Rahkesh, you should be mostly healed by then…and perhaps you should get some rest now, you look like you're about to pass out."

"Am I actually conscious then?" Rahkesh asked, failing at any humor given that his skin had practically turned grey from pain and exhaustion. "Sure doesn't feel like it." As he said it his vision began to fade, Sygra lowered the magics she had been using help him stay conscious.

XX

Rahkesh woke on a soft bed in a strange room. His vision was fine again, and some of the pain had receded. The room was immense, all marble and white and cream colored stone. The walls had some ornate tapestries, the floor a few colorful stone mosaics, and the high domed ceiling had a silver and white wooden fan slowly turning. He looked around to find Sygra coiled in a patch of sunlight on his chest.

_How long was I out?_

_All night. The ancient one took us back another four days. It is almost noon._

_Are you healed?_

_Ssssss. I was never injured. I'm too quick for some silly demon to get._ Sygra told him, nose in the air.

_Where is everyone?_

_The ancient dark angel returned to her clan. Daray is here, along with the other demon. Daray…can't leave. They tried to move him magically but the strain of the time travel is keeping him from apparating, or teleporting, or using portkeys. His demon magic is going crazy as the potions wear off. He'll have to transform here. Namach…was not pleased with the idea. However there is a secure cavern under the far side of the hill._

_You recognize Sharahak at all? _

_Of course. It is good to see him again._ Sygra said. _He and the ancient vampire have been talking all night. They seem to get along. _

_Sharahak only told us how he got into the demon realm. He glossed over everything else. Did you notice that? _

_I did. I do think he was speaking truly when he said that there wasn't much to tell. As you slept Daray said the same thing, Sharahak said that he became a scholar, gathering knowledge and building libraries. He did some research in demon magic, but not much. He was a bit of a recluse I think. So I doubt there is much to tell. Being part vampire he is of course sterile and never found a mate. He also never adjusted to their culture. _

_Yes, that does make sense. Sharahak is hardly a sadist, and he didn't approve of slavery even when it was common. I suppose he was being truthful then when he said there wasn't much to his life there. _

_Agreed. He gave Namach some details of how he tricked them, but apart from his knowledge of the demons he doesn't really want to talk about his own life. He talks like he was observing it all, rather than participating. _Sygra told him, and Rahkesh was once again impressed with his familiar's intelligence.

_You are an excellent observer._

_With your friends it takes some doing. Someone has to look after you after all. And what is that? _She asked, pulling the piece of canvas out of his boot. Rahkesh took it, wondering why Nicodemus would go and have more paintings done?

Rahkesh removed the covering of the canvas and unfolded it. It was old and yellowing at the edges, but the preservation spells had done their work. The painting had been rolled up for over a thousand years, yet the colors were as bright as ever. Seeing the tiny piece of wood attached to a corner he drew a knife and scratched his finger. When the drop of blood touched the wood it shimmered and grew into a full frame, stretching the painting out within it.

The painting before him had been done by a skilled artist, in vibrant colors. It was him, dressed as one of the Chachapoyaro. Sygra was around his neck and Nicodemus was sitting beside him. They were halfway up one of the cliffs near the city, a cracked grey rock covered in draping bright green vines. Rahkesh did not remember having ever posed for such a painting, and guessed that the artist had done them all from memory.

He flipped the painting over, and grinned; in the lower right corner were two thumb prints. This was not just a painting then. Nicodemus had told him about this method of hiding communications. It was used by Xuelhuala messengers, and anyone else who didn't want everyone being able to read their letters. The print farthest to the right was the writer, the others were those who could read it. Rahkesh pressed his thumb to the left print, and writing appeared across the back of the canvas.

_My dearest Rahkesh, _

_I hope this finds you in good health and back where you belong. We could never find a way of being certain that you had made it back to the correct time and place, and it has haunted me ever since that you all might have been thrown into a strange land in another wrong time. Kalahimran assures me the ritual worked correctly, but I can't help fearing for the three of you (six if you count your little menagerie)._

_All of us here have missed you greatly, I do believe Xeri has been in mourning over the loss of Nuri (he always did prefer her). If you are reading this then you probably got it from Sharahak, but perhaps not. He may not have survived, though I do hope he did. The seers could not tell what will happen to him, they say his future vanishes abruptly, but does not die. Perhaps he found a way to do yet another body switch. _

_Xeri and I joined the Xuelhuala a few years after you left. About a decade ago I was made General of the Advance Force (I am thirty eight now…I have no idea how long it took Sharahak to deliver this). I have very much enjoyed military life, though that might have something to do with enjoying killing Inca a little too much._

The writing changed, the same hand but with a sharper angle to it. Rahkesh recognized the way Nicodemus wrote when he was distressed or writing very fast.

_However I am not writing to talk about my life. Several hundred years ago the Xuelhuala were presented with a scenario by one of our senior generals. He asked a simple question: what will happen if one day the Xuelhuala fail? What if there is no one left living to guard our people? What can we do to ensure that this does not happen, and that there is a back up plan in case it does? _

_Rigorous paranoia is a trained mindset among us, as is being almost ridiculously over-prepared. And so we decided to solve this problem. I find the solution to be rather clever. Never mind the exact magics of this, quite simply we have created a reserve force of several thousand, capable of being activated at a moment's notice should the need arise._

_Now I know you're thinking "why is this so special?" It is special Rahkesh, because this reserve force is frozen in time. As the centuries have passed the best and the brightest of the Xuelhuala have voluntarily sent themselves into a timeless sleep, against the day our people, or the world, needs an army to defend it._

_Why am I telling you this? Against the laws of the Xuelhuala? Because of what I saw. _

_Xuelhuala warriors go through a secret ritual upon initiation into each new rank level. The initiation for a General is a magical one, and intense enough that occasionally people die. I cannot give you any details, but the magics at work at that time are immense. During my initiation I saw something that disturbed me greatly._

_X_

_I saw my mind swirling in colors, charging forward over the centuries, and a sense of growing danger with every passing year. Then I began to hear the screams, intense breathless endless screaming. Fire flew everywhere, obscuring my vision and black smoke wafted through in front of me, it smell awful. It hurt, the death stink on the hot air. Charred flesh and boiling blood. _

_A cobblestone street emerged, rivers of red blood running down the gutters, blood splashed across empty doorways and shattered windows. The homes were abandoned, a ghost town dripping blood from windowsills and gaping holes in burning rooftops. Blood on the tree trunks, blood smeared on doors and running down front steps, dripping from gutters and turning street-side flowerbeds into red squishy marshes. Bits of flesh, skin and intestines, were smeared over hedges and hung off railings. Claw marks raked down the sides of the buildings, huge gouges through the wood and stone. A human arm lay, detached from its owner, carelessly flung upon a staircase. People were screaming, individuals now, shrieks of terror and the moans of the dying. _

_Then I was in a mind not my own, another being, one who craved death and destruction. I have never felt so disembodied before, but I was seeing into the mind of some other creature, and believe it may well have been a demon. _

_He loved this, the blood, the rich stink of fear, bloodlust raced through his veins and he roared, calling his flock to another kill. The sky was red, red with fire and fear, and the flames reflected off the underside of the black clouds of smoke._ _The demon thought the blood tasted good, smelled good too, he wanted more of it. _

_The emotions and thoughts of the demon's mind were so strong…the overwhelming emotions and blood thirst, the drive to destroy and conquer that was so thick I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of war._

_Wings beat through the air and shrieks of triumph sounded overhead. Magic lashed out; flowing through the streets, the remaining windows shattered and the screams were engulfed in magic. Then they went silent. _

_X_

_If what I have seen is true then at some point in your future, or possibly it is already happening, the demons will rise again from their realm to try to claim ours. And so I write this letter, one that the current Xuelhuala force would be most upset with. If you do not already know what is coming, then you must be warned. My people are safe enough. We have removed them to a place outside the world. I do not fear for their safety. All signs point to a remarkably peaceful future. But I fear for you Rahkesh, I fear for what will happen to the rest of the world. _

_Only a fool believes isolation is the same as safety. And we are no fools. The Xuelhuala might not all approve of this. But the other Generals and I are agreed that if the demons do invade then it is in our best interest to stand with the rest of the world against them. If everyone else falls, then we cannot hope to fight alone. And so when the demons do break free of their realm we will fight with the world, and hope that our joined forces are enough. _

_If the day ever arises when there is no hope of stopping them, and when whatever fighting forces exist in your time are not enough to withstand the demon invasion, then summon the Xuelhuala. Our sleeping army lies in an ancient city hidden far from the world in both space and magic. To reach them seek the ancient underground river which flows beneath where the Urubamba and the Utcubamba rivers join. Follow the waters of either one until you reach the point where they join the waters of the other. You can reach it magically by drawing the Xuelhuala insignia on the water's surface. Do be careful, it is a bit of a rough trip. The cave of red diamonds. _

_The living descendants of my people, assuming they exist still, have only one connection to the world. On the new moon seek the Vilcabamba river, where it joins the Urubamba there is an underwater cavern. I know these locations are different from where we were when you visited. We are outside normal space and so location of the gateways matters little._

_My friend, though it pains me, I do not expect we will ever meet again. The likelihood of my surviving a thousand years is about zero, and I suspect your chances of ever going this far back in time are about the same. Depressing though the thought is, I suspect it is for the best, you have much that needs to be done in your time. _

_On that note I hope you are well and haven't gotten into any more of your exceedingly dangerous "accidents", though I suppose you probably will never stop, fate has it in for you. Say hello to Sharahak for me, I do not know what his future holds, but the seers were uncomfortable with it, I only hope he came through without serious harm. _

_With love, _

_Nicodemus_

_Commanding General Xuelhuala Advance Force_

Rahkesh noted that there was a second page – the thumb print was slightly blue. But he did not want to read it yet. It had been painful enough to read the first. He had missed his Chachapoyaro friend greatly, and hearing from him now, though it was reassuring to know Nicodemus had lived and done well, still made his eyes ache.

Instead in he closed the letter, pressing his thumb to the print and turning it clockwise. The canvas went blank. Turning it over he placed it on the table beside the bed, watching the image while his mind mulled over the information. Nicodemus hadn't given much information about his own life, but Rahkesh didn't need details Nic had always been completely committed to joining the Xuelhuala. It was his only real goal and it came as no surprise that he enjoyed the life so much that he didn't need anything else.

Rahkesh put aside musing of his friend's life for later, and instead focused on the reasons for Nicodemus's sending the message. That vision Nicodemus had had sounded so familiar. Almost exactly like one Rahkesh had had over the summer…no, it was exactly the same, down to the bloody gory details. Rahkesh marveled over how that was possible, that they could have the exact same vision over a thousand years apart. How had that happened? It should not have even been conceivable, especially since Rahkesh had long suspected that the Chachapoyaro were not entirely human.

But identical dreams and visions aside, amazing though they were, what was more important was the rest of the letter. Nicodemus had just given the world a fall-back if things got really bad. And Rahkesh suspected that it would get very much worse.

But had he told Daray and Silas the same thing? Probably not, Rahkesh decided. Nicodemus and he had always been very close, closer than he was with any of his other friends, and he didn't think Nicodemus was going to trust the two vampires with a secret like this, as much as he might have been friends with the two.

This then was a decision Rahkesh alone would have to make. When to call on the Xuelhuala. For surely they would eventually be needed, them and whatever remained of the Chachapoyaro. But he would not drag them from their isolation unless it was truly necessary. Or, maybe they would come on their own when the demon invasions started again. Either way, it was something he would have to think about for a long time.

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Please Review

**Much spport for eirame who is still translating this story into french, poor thing, I know this chapter is going to be a killer because it's so long. Sorry.**

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Well several people guessed Sharahak getting into the demon realm would involve a portal (it had to) but no one guessed the Loch Ness monster. Heh. More on that beast later perhaps.

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Well this is the longest chapter I have ever written. Don't expect the next for a while. If I hadn't unexpectedly gotten two days off I never would have written this.

I would like to reassure everyone that I will be continuing this fic after the release of Book Seven. I suppose I'll have to label it as AU…as if it wasn't already…

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GodricGryff – my patience, such as it is, is wearing thin with this question. Please reread the first chapter of this fic (I'm assuming you did in fact read it at all the first time, rather than just reviewing). Your question has been answered, in the sixth sentence.


	14. Chapter 14

Many thanks for Ahlmal and Eirame for their efforts in translating these fics.

Bob – reread please, in this fic I have Dumbledore being wrong and Harry was naturally a parseltongue.

The Lady Reka – oh thank you for such a thoughtful review.

Narutopsykoz – the name Rahkesh doesn't have an origin, at least not intentionally. I was mixing letters for interesting sounds and came up with that.

Ffn notices – Daray and Silas were born vampires – they were changed as infants. Sorry if that confused you, I meant they had never really had a mortal life but for a few months.

Blackisback69 – you can see whatever you want. I wrote this fic so you can see whatever you feel like.

Kyle Law – Namach and Sharahak are NOT the same age. Namach is more than three thousand, Sharahak is quite a bit less.

RatherFabulous – I love you. Anyone who came make me laugh out loud reading their review is a living miracle. I bow to your sense of humor, if only I could get rid of Voldemort like that…

Zi ma gesto – thanks, apparently some people still need all that cleared up.

Toki Mirage - hey you're still around! I've been checking your fic every so often, thanks for the review, you always make me think.

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**Yeah! Book 7 is out! In case anyone was still wondering - this fic WILL continue.**

**On a less happy note, I will be leaving for a few weeks in mid August. No internet. I'll post again before that, but then it might be a while.**

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Chapter 14

There was a warm breeze blowing in from the open windows, stirring the sheer silk curtains. Rahkesh was staring at the jeweled Simurgs flying across the ceiling. The artist had been exceptionally thorough, the birds almost looked real. The sunlight poring in the windows like liquid gold was turning dusky and pink, it was evening again. Outside the sounds from the thick lush jungle that bordered the Nile were switching from day-active life forms to night-active ones.

Rahkesh turned to the white pillars long the walls that held up the ceiling. They were very much like the ones in Namach's rooms at Akren, but with opals placed into the stone in long tendril-like designs. The ceiling was plated in real gold and covered with displays of Simurgs done in real gemstones. The ancient vampire was wealthy almost beyond belief, and displayed that wealth in everything he owned. The couches were covered in the finest silks with real gold thread brocade on them. Across from the pillars long the walls more marble pillars separated the massive windows and had silver and sapphires built into ropes that entwined in symbols all over them. The floor mosaics were also precious gems, and the door handles were solid gold, silver, and amethysts, even the door hinges were silver. Namach was possibly the wealthiest being alive, surpassed only possibly by Cyala Ateres. It was just a little absurd and should have looked incredibly tacky and overdone, but somehow it managed to blend and look tasteful. Perhaps if you had an eternity then designed amazing rooms with enough wealth to buy a country was a good time-consuming activity.

Rahkesh's headaches were gone, his vision steady. His cheek hurt and his back and leg throbbed dully. Slowly healing as the demon venom wore off and the wounds began to repair themselves. He'd been injured so often by demons, maybe he would build up some sort of immunity to the venom. Wishful thinking probably, but it would be nice if he got something useful out of being injured so much. Lately he'd been spending as much time healing as being healthy. He had slept for a long time, and while his magic was still healing and he needed rest he'd slept so much he couldn't fall asleep again if he tried.

_This is irritating. I have a week and I can't do magic. I could be practicing a containment spell to capture that dementor, working on the bloodmagic to finish off Voldemort, or running a bloodmagic test to find out what's wrong with me. What a waste of time. _Rahkesh complained to Sygra.

He had already worked out on paper how his removal of the soul from Slytherin's locket would go. He would get a dementor tied to the locket to break Voldemort's soul-pull enchantment. Next he would have to use his captive vampire to create a series of broken runes in a way that would create a vortex across the life-death barrier. Then he'd just have to pick out his connection to Voldemort clip it out of his mind, and toss the link through the vortex. The link would drag open the locket, since the soul-pull was cancelled, and Voldemort's horcrux would be dragged through. The vortex would shut down from the mass going through and Rahkesh would kill the vampire to seal it closed. It was complicated but Voldemort had been very clever with this one. Rahkesh would still have one of Voldemort's horcruxes in him when it ended, but he was mostly through a plan to get rid of that. The only thing that could go wrong would be the horcrux he carried, which was a separate entity form the link he and Voldemort shared. The piece of soul might not react well to having so much of its creator's magic dying around it. Rahkesh would have to find time to talk that over with Namach first.

He would have started one designing the bloodmagic rituals he wanted to do. He had been planning a magic directing ritual and focusing one, but hadn't gotten to do either on schedule. He needed both before he could do the next one to allow for easier poison removal. However, he needed his current bloodmagic working and stable in order to feel out what was needed for the next pieces. So that was out of the question.

_I think healing should be foremost on your mind._ The young basilisk chided him.

_Not a whole lot I can really do there. _Rahkesh sighed. _Why don't you go have a look around, there's no need to stay here._

_I think I will go explore some. There must be rodents around here I've never seen. Where are we?_

_Ethiopia. _Rahkesh replied. _Do be careful. I didn't get a chance to see if Eli was here, but if he is stay away._

Sygra hissed an agreement and left. Rahkesh hoped that Namach had not brought his familiar with him. The magical lizard hated Rahkesh because he "smelled wrong" and had transferred some of his dislike to Sygra. Who did not help the situation by being overprotective and spitting curses at Eli every time they met.

Rahkesh pushed the pillow behind him higher up. He still wasn't able to do much more than walk to the bathroom and back. After reading the letter Nicodemus had left him concealed in the painting Rahkesh had fallen asleep again. Someone had been in while he rested – there was a tray with ice water and a few sandwiches on the large beside table. But for the moment he was alone. It was late evening. As darkness fell he was expecting the vampires and demon to wake soon, if they'd slept through the day. Upon waking he'd realized that he was going to be spending the next week, or six days now, in the company of two vampires and a demon. Strange company indeed. If someone had told him two years previous (not counting time travel) that he'd be spending a week with those two species he'd have thought them insane. If they'd said that one would be the unofficial Lord of Vampires, one a fifteen hundred plus year old vampire-turned-demon and one a vampire with a demon animagus he would have signed that person into the nearest asylum.

There was probably at least one library in the palace somewhere, but he couldn't get up to find it and he couldn't summon any books, too risky with his magic such a mess and straining to heal him.

Instead Rahkesh began one of the exercises they'd been taught in his Mind Magic class. A basic technique that they were tested on every so often to see how far they'd progressed. He closed his eyes, relaxed his breathing, and began to meditate. Sinking deep into a dark pool he felt about with his magical senses. Feeling for the flows of magic that filled the blood and soul of a magical being. He found them, and although they were invisible he could feel them the way he could feel a spider web when he placed his palm over it.

Bits of magic were sparking around disjointedly. Rather than smooth, powerful, coordinated flows that moved like a river with a strong current he encountered a hailstorm of magic flying every which way. No wonder he hurt so much. When the magic worked properly it flowed over, around and through the body smoothly, moving in all directions endlessly like a well-coordinated kaleidoscope built of strings. Now he had bits and pieces moving, forming, splintering, disintegrating and reforming in complete chaos. While all the flows shifted everywhere at once naturally they were all connected and movement in one place corresponded to another shift elsewhere. Those connections weren't being made anymore.

Remembering what it was supposed to look like Rahkesh gently began to massage the magic to where it was supposed to be. He began soothing out knotted clumps of magic and drawing their tangled writhing threads through and around him to begin the endless motion. Keeping the pressure constant and steady Rahkesh dragged magic into graceful moving streams with his mind, careful not to let go until the magic was connected into perpetual motion around him.

Blinking open his eyes Rahkesh realized that he instantly felt better, though even more tired. Perhaps if he did that every few hours he would heal faster. As for the bloodmagic, whenever he tried to feel for the runes that shaped it into working pieces he heard his basilisk form hissing randomly and flashes of connectivity interspaced between jumbled pin-pricks of unattached magic. Namach had said to leave that alone for a while longer before working on checking the damage to each individual piece. Rahkesh felt like it had been long enough, but the basilisk was getting in the way. What the snake form wanted that made it jibber and break into his bloodmagic he didn't know, and until he did Rahkesh would have to be careful.

Since he could do no more with his magic Rahkesh went back to staring at the ceiling, bored, then he remembered that he still had his magical earrings with their trunks inside, undamaged. He would have to modify them at some point – the piercing were poorly placed in his basilisk form and it was only a matter of time before they got torn out of his scales in a fight.

From the first trunk Rahkesh took out the cracked remains of the staff weapon made for him by Xeri and Nic. He and his friends had given up on fixing it, but Sharahak had helped to build it and so he would know if it was possible to repair the broken weapon. Rahkesh hoped it was, he'd been very fond of the gift.

In the other of the trunks was a set of maps he'd copied from the Chachapoyaro archives. He located the rivers Nicodemus had spoken of, and memorized their locations before putting the maps away. Next he picked out a current world map, it was a magical map and he could zoom in on an area of interest, he found the right area and located the same rivers, oddly their names hadn't changed. Even if he lost the letter and the maps, unlikely, he'd always know where to go, Rahkesh had a good memory for geography, though not at all for road maps.

He was just putting the maps away when he sensed something from his connection to Sharahak, and a moment later Sharahak strolled into the room. The cream and grey demon was walking upright on his hind legs. From what Daray often said this was not particularly comfortable for demons to do. Sharahak settled onto one of the bench-like couches in the room. The couches had no backs but high pillowed ends.

He was still looking a little tattered from his fight with the demon sorcerer while coming through the portal. The gashes that covered his hide were mostly healed, but the pinkish scars were still fading. Sharahak had retained some of the vampiric healing abilities, and they were helping him recover now.

Rahkesh greeted him, first a Chachapoyaro greeting meaning "it is good to see you" and then again in English, "it's been a while hasn't it?"

"Longer for me than for you." Sharahak said softly.

"Indeed. It has been barely half a year here." Rahkesh said. "A pity it took so long. If I'd known I might have attempted to time travel and help you get out sooner."

"I imagine that would not have ended terribly well." Sharahak said. "And once established as a recluse it wasn't so bad. I just had to remember to fake my death and choose myself as an heir every generation so no suspected I was immortal."

"I felt your presence before you walked into the room. I assume our connection is still strong then."

"It seems so. We could probably communicate telepathically if we needed too. I sense that your mind magic has greatly improved in a half year." Sharahak said.

"I've been practicing a lot. Most of the other Akren students are sensitive to such things, even the mortals work on mind magics a lot. Mind magic is good cross-training for other magic."

"It does generally help other areas of magic expand." Sharahak agreed.

"Did the travel through the portal cause any damage?" Rahkesh asked.

"No, not particularly. I used all the remnant vampire magics I could draw on to make it easier. I'm exhausted and won't be doing anything much for a several days yet but the only real injury came from the sorcerer." Sharahak said with a sigh. "How are you?"

"Healing, slowly." Rahkesh said with a shrug and a wince as fresh new scar tissue protested the motion. His whole body was a mess from one or another thing. The past few weeks had been rough.

"You do manage to get injured an awful lot." Sharahak said with a small smile. No doubt recalling the injuries Rahkesh had taken fighting the Inca.

"Even for an Akren student he manages to lose a preposterous amount of blood through fighting wounds." Namach agreed, walking in with two diamond and gold glasses of blood. Sharahak moved swiftly to his feet as the older vampire entered, Namach waved him back down and handed him one of the glasses of blood. "It's Nefertiti's." He added, nodding to the blood. Naturally Namach served nothing but the best to his guests. Sharahak stared at him for a moment before sipping it. The ancient was clad in an open-fronted lightweight dark red shirt, soft black pants, high ornate black boots, a heavy gold armband with a beautiful dragon carving attached, clutching a white opal, and a heavy necklace of bloodmetal links that shone gold, black and red, with a dragon carved from gold and white opal hanging from it and all in all looking a bit like something from another century. Then again most old vampires had difficulty keeping up with modern fashion, or just didn't care.

"Thank you. I didn't know preservation enchantments were in use that long ago." The demon said slowly.

"Only by a few." Namach said, "it would be hard to go without such exquisite blood when she died so of course we had to store some. Actually at one point we were drawing blood every three weeks. I'd have to check but I think there's another fifty bottles in the cellar. We got a lot from the ruling bloodline; they were so inbred they had their own taste you see."

Rahkesh noted the "we" in that sentence and wondered briefly if Namach had in fact been alive and in Egypt at that point. For all that he was supposed to be Egyptian, or from somewhere close, he really didn't look quite Egyptian. Then Rahkesh decided it really didn't matter and there was a good chance that the ancient himself didn't know how old he was. Instead he pondered briefly over the value of that blood, before dismissing that thought as well. Wealth had a different meaning to Namach than to most.

"Even for an Akren student I manage to get into a lot of extreme situations." Rahkesh countered.

"True. Has Fengyang challenged you yet?" Namach asked with a laugh at Rahkesh's eye roll.

"We came to an agreement wherein he will attempt to keep his little pride under some sort of control so that they stop assaulting me." Rahkesh replied. "And a basic understanding that while he can take me physically, for now, I can outdo him magically. If he wants to attack he'll have to do it in a place where I can't afford to use magic. I gave him a chance in a muggle club a few days ago, he talked instead so he's not totally mindless." Then he changed direction. "Did you and Cyala know there was a demon army ready to attack?" It was a very direct question and Namach's sharp look said he did not approve of being questioned, but Rahkesh was being as decidedly non-aggressive as possible so that ancient didn't seem too annoyed. A vampire would never have dared to ask so directly.

"Yes. I had identified the chamber as being a portal before we began." Namach finally said as he took the other couch. "I had been there before but hadn't sensed it then. The fae had just finished some experiment and whatever they did left a residue that reacted with the magics in a way I could sense."

"Why summon then? Unless Cyala just wanted to teach Sven not to ignore her advice?" Rahkesh asked.

"Well there was that. Sergio will be groveling for decades. Sven's gone, and good riddance. His replacement Jerashil is a vast improvement, she already sent a thank-you note to Cyala. No, the real problem was the upcoming ICW meeting. While Europe is collapsing into anarchy and desperation the rest of the world, while terrified, is not so much affected. Cyala and I were worried they would start to think that these demon attacks are only small occurrences, isolated incidents. There's even a thought that the Europeans did something to piss off the demons. We just wanted to clear things up real well. Now it's not just Europe. Demon portals could be anywhere and now we know that they're preparing an all-put invasion with everything they've got. There were only a few who actually thought that the plague was only an attack of Europe, but we really wanted to cement the danger in everyone's minds. A world-wide invasion from another realm by millions of demons. Now that's a thought to frighten everyone into action. That's why we made sure so many species were represented when it happened. Now the imminent threat of a demonic invasion is much sharper in all minds. Plague are plagues, even when used as weapons to kill…almost two hundred thousand is it now?...they still don't have quite the effect an invasion does on people's minds.

More importantly we wanted some information on the demonic capabilities. I wanted to meet their sorcerers, we were hoping for captive demons to interrogate if possible, and lastly we wanted to check some of our world's fighting forces against the demons. The two fae species present, the wolf fae and the Vashora, are well regarded fighters. The Vashora didn't have a single casualty and used barely a fraction of their abilities, they and the Vascari are the fae you really don't want to cross. We also wanted a look at what everyone said was one of the better human fighting squads. That team of aurors is world famous. They also did very well. Sergio's forces were pretty good, fatalities were mostly newer young vampires and there weren't too many deaths, but Sven's fighters were completely massacred, maybe six or seven survived."

"So there are some fighting forces prepared and trained enough to at the least stand their ground in a fight." Rahkesh said, "I've never heard of the Vashora."

"That is the name of their species that they give humans, they call themselves something else. They're not common around Akren, the last one said we weren't fierce enough, said we trained weak cowards." Namach said with a wry grin. Rahkesh stared for a moment, then he had to laugh. "They're a tree-based species, meld with plants, very, very scary. They rejected the fae council centuries ago – not decisive enough. I avoid crossing paths with them; every one has a biochemical arsenal enough to take out anything they care to attack." Namach told them. Rahkesh added the Vashora to his mental list of creatures to never offend.

"About this invasion. What will you do?" Sharahak asked. "Their fighting forces number in the many millions and are well trained. And they are getting a bit desperate. They _need_ more slaves."

"Been killing them all too quick huh?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes. And too few breeding. There are inbreeding fears." Sharahak said. "They desperately need fresh breeders to keep the population of slaves going."

"Well a good portion of Europe can not be relied upon to defend themselves much less help anyone else. With this plague any army gathered would just be slaughtered the second a bit of plague got in." Rahkesh said.

"The Americans and the Chinese are gathering forces, they'll be calling for all armed forces to join up at the ICW meeting. For the first time in history every species has been invited and the MLFC invoked." Namach said, "the MLFC stands for Magical Life Forms Conclave. It hasn't ever actually happened until now. It will be the first real gathering of all sentient magical life. Should be interesting."

"Interesting. The understatement of this century." Rahkesh said. "How many representatives will there be per species?"

"Ten of each species per continent is the maximum, except for the fae, who have twelve per continent because there are so many varieties. That will wind up being about a thousand representatives all told. The definition of magical "being" in this case is defined by the widest definition available. In this case the most open definition belongs to the Russians and the Canadians, who, for unknown reasons, include trolls, whereas the Americans, Norwegians, Swiss, Taiwanese, Egyptians and Israelis, the next closest contenders, do not."

"How'd the Swiss get on that list? I thought they had joined the anti-vampire alliance?" Rahkesh asked. And how had anyone decided that trolls were intelligent?

"Oh they did. But they still acknowledge them as magical beings. Actually it was only the latest government that liked the idea of joining with everyone else. The general populace is as neutral as ever. I truly don't know anything more. They're in a very odd political state right now. The fae have been pushing a revolt against the current Ministry so perhaps it'll sort itself out. Anyway whatever pieces are left will in all likelihood be very open minded. I suspect everyone else will be dead. A true purge of every bigot in the country." Namach said cheerfully. Rahkesh wondered if perhaps the ancient got a bit bored with the common every-day stuff so that the occasional bloody revolution or revolt seemed much less dull than everything else in his endless existence.

"The demons we've seen over the past year have all been adolescents. What about the ones in that cavern?" Rahkesh asked.

"They were also adolescents." Namach said, "well trained certainly but young nonetheless. With the single exception of the lead sorcerer. The others were all young sorcerers. Cyala and I had figured that out before hand, had there been a serious possibility of adult demons coming through we would never have done it."

"Sharahak?"

"Adult demons are very hard to transport. It wasn't moving too many that destroyed that altar. It was moving me." Sharahak explained. "That thing could have handled fourteen demons, two per wedge, with each activation. That small altar was meant for the sorcerers, and the larger altar that spanned the cavern was for a common summoning of Order Two demons."

Rahkesh thought hard, confused and trying to follow what Sharahak was saying. "I got that the altar in the center was for sorcerers. But the rest?" Rahkesh asked.

"Demon rankings are very complex, each Order is a subspecies. Within every Order there are several Sets. Demons from the same Order can mate and reproduce without magical assistance. The offspring may wind up being of any of the Sets in that Order, regardless of what Sets the parents are from." Sharahak explained. "Set is determined by intelligence, with some small physical differences. The demons in that cavern were all Order Two demons. There are two Sets in Order Two, and all of those demons are fighters. Order Two is entirely military. Set is determined by the physical differences that make each demon a better fighter in flight or on the ground."

"Uh huh. That sounds awfully complex." Rahkesh said, hoping that he wound never have cause to memorize all of that.

"It is. It took me a year to get it all right. The Sorcerers are all Beta or Alpha demons. In this case they were Betas, all young and still in training, except for the leader. She came into this realm several years ago, matured here, and has been hiding ever since."

"We guessed that Daray was an Alpha, you are a Beta demon?"

"Yes. Which is why he's having such a problem. Alpha's have an extra metamorphosis." Sharahak explained, "I had one small one to go through to become an adult. His is more complex, involves a good deal more magic, and has larger consequences."

"You can still help him though right?"

"Yes. I've been in the demon realm long enough to learn what goes on." Sharahak assured him. "I've explained it to Daray. He's meditating and using his bloodmagic to remove all impurities from his system."

"The potions have just about fully worn off, sooner than expected actually. We'll give his transformation a try tomorrow night. Midnight I think so he's fully awake." Namach said.

"Great. I get to spend a week with nocturnal beings. My internal clock is going to be so far off when I get back I'll be sleeping through all my classes." Rahkesh sighed. The other two chuckled.

"Just get to know how the weaker vampire students often feel." Sharahak said.

"No not truly. All the vampires at Akren are powerful enough that they aren't that bad off." Rahkesh replied.

"He's right. We do only admit the very best and they're all magical from powerful bloodlines." Namach agreed.

"Why did such schools not exist when I was young?" Sharahak complained.

"We were still stuck with just an apprentice system." Namach replied. "And a poor version of it at that. When you were young the system was just falling into a complete collapse. When we brought it back a few centuries later it worked better, but at that time it had deteriorated something terrible. And the more powerful those involved the less actually useful it was. When you were young apprentices spent more time acting as whores for their masters than actually learning. I imagine you were better off being a wanderer."

"Sounds like you didn't approve much." Sharahak said.

"Hell no. Oh I like the apprentice system just fine, it's still used today even. But it had gone to pieces right about that time in a bad way. Rather awful couple of centuries actually. So few decent brains around. Too many power-hungry vampires, too many vampires. No top-down management to make sure everything was working and the brightest youngsters weren't getting kicked around too much. Actually I suppose a lot of it is my fault since I had just finished killing every vampire older than myself. Removed all governing bodies really, no control over society, too many large territories up for grabs. Messed everything up for several centuries."

"Why did you kill all the old ones?" Sharahak asked.

"I felt like doing so." Namach replied shortly. Rahkesh made a mental note to never ask about that. The ancient vampire wasn't touchy about much but apparently his reason for exterminating all older vampires was one of those few things he didn't talk about. "Created a bit of mess eventually, but it did stabilize out nicely in the end. And those few centuries were not without some good times. I have to admit it was very easy and a lot of fun to toy with the then-new christian religion. Not quite as fun as making mortals think we were actually gods like we did a thousand years earlier, but amusing none the less when we tricked them into burning their own priests and such." Namach said with a cold, fanged, grin. Rahkesh reminded himself that the usually pleasant and conscientious ancient did have a very dark side that could get cold and cruel at times.

Sharahak was eyeing Namach warily, and Rahkesh decided to change the subject quickly.

"I've been examining my bloodmagic. It seems to be healing from the overload quickly." Rahkesh said. "I haven't tried to activate anything but the runes don't ache and I can't feel them on my skin anymore. My vision's normal, and I think most of the demon venom has finished."

"Best leave it for at least another two days." Namach said. "You were injured during the raid on the British Ministry, nearly killed and almost went into a complete psychic shock during your work with Silas, and injured again during the fight in the cavern. Give yourself time to heal. Better heal completely and be out for a few days than heal partially and have your body or magic fail at a critical time."

"I've also been seeking the cause of my recent bloodmagic issues. When I transformed in that cavern I noticed that there was an unusual amount of energy coming from my Basilisk form. I was actually able to channel the thunderbird's magic into it and even to cast spells while in my snake form. I've never been able to do that before. Now, when I try to glance at the magic from the runes on me I get parselmagic and jumbled up hissing."

"Ahh. So the basilisk could be the source the energy that has been allowing your recent unusually fast rate of rituals?" Namach asked. He turned to a confused Sharahak. "He has an animal form of a thunderbird - that's an animagus, and because he's a parslemouth – a snake speaker, he can turn into a snake, in his case a Basilisk."

"Impressive." Sharahak said softly. "There seems to be a lot for me to catch up on."

"Yes. The past thousand years have seen some incredible advances in magic. Not so much a sudden leap as a steady progression." Namach agreed. "Rahkesh can you find the answer to this in the snake-magic?"

"No. Along with my healing ability I lost some portion of the knowledge contained in the magic." Rahkesh said. He then had to explain to Sharahak what the parselmagic entailed. The demon admitted that he had heard of snake-speakers being great healers, but had never gotten any real details during his travels.

While Rahkesh was explaining his magic to Sharahak, and the demon using some of his remnant vampire magics to place it all into memory, Daray came in. He was in vampire form, looking ill and a bit rumpled, like he'd slept poorly or not at all. Namach waved him into the remaining seat before he collapsed, and summoned a glass of blood from somewhere. It came floating into the room a moment later.

"Thanks." Daray said, "are those going to heal?" He asked, gesturing to the places where the lead demon sorcerer had managed to injure Namach. The wounds were sealed over but glowing a faint white just under the skin.

"When I let them. I'm keeping the magic in that thing's poison active so I can examine it." Namach replied.

"You've got demon venom stuck under your skin and you want it there?" Rahkesh asked carefully. Namach chuckled softly.

"I suppose when put that way it does sound a little absurd. I'm finishing my little experiment from the fight."

"What happened?" Rahkesh asked curiously, he'd been waiting for the right time to ask what had happened between Namach and the lead sorcerer. It had appeared to be quite a fight, but then the ancient had destroyed the sorcerer with such ease that Rahkesh wasn't sure if it hadn't all been some elaborate plan that he'd missed the point of.

"I invaded its mind." Namach said with a very self-satisfied smirk. "I wanted to know what its plans were, in full, what its orders were, and everything else I could get. I stole its entire memory. I needed a blood connection for the full removal, and some of its venom to figure out the magics so I let it claw me a bit. Safer than drinking its blood. From the magic that creates the poison I learned the bits I needed to cut its mind open. After that it didn't have much of a working mind left, fighting instincts only really. Cutting someone's memory out generally makes them an easy kill."

Rahkesh blinked and processed that. The vampire had used poison and some sort of reverse bloodmagic to get enough of a grasp of demon magic to access the mind of an adult Beta sorcerer and remove its memory, while fighting it. With an envious mental sigh Rahkesh wondered if he'd ever become skilled enough to manage something like that.

"Learn anything interesting?"

"I won't know for a while. I put the memory in a spare pensieve and now I'm just draining off the residual demon energy so I can view it. Vampire and demon magics mix like oil and water so until the rest of the energy is gone it's inaccessible."

"I can draw out a basic map of the demon realm. Being able to place events from its memory might make more sense." Sharahak offered.

"Excellent idea. Is their realm round like a planet? Or did they copy the elves and go for a never-ending realm with no apparent borders or shape?" Namach asked.

"Ah…well I don't much about the elves, but I'm pretty sure the demon realm is round. All their maps are globes." Sharahak said. "How did the elves manage that? Shouldn't it be physically and magically impossible?"

"They'd never actually tell us. But they're not from this universe so I don't suppose we'd be able to understand any of the magics involved even if they did explain. Of course there's always the possibility that it is a round planet-like realm and they just want everyone to think it goes on forever to confuse all other species, I wouldn't put it past them." Namach said with a smile. "Don't stress your brain over it. It doesn't really matter."

"About the elves. They have to know what happened in Mexico, but do they know about Sharahak?" Rahkesh asked. Sharahak suddenly began looking very worried.

"Given that there were six of them in that cavern watching the whole event I'd say they all know about him. Since they're not here demanding his death I assume they either don't care or haven't decided anything. Probably the later. I'll contact them when we get back to the proper time with his story. I'm sure they'll want to interview you, Sharahak, but I doubt they'll want to kill you."

"Why not? I'm a demon."

"They won't kill you because as far as their interactions with demons extend whatever their Champion – the official title is actually _Sentinel_ - says is what happens, and while Ferraidar is an insane killing machine on the battle field he's really very reasonable otherwise. They'll want to get everything you know about demons to match it to their records to see if anything has changed since they were last updated, and they'll want your view on the past thousand years of demon history. I imagine you'll be seeing them regularly for months in not years. However, while Ferraidar and his forces may be intelligent enough not to go and kill you the younger, more impulsive elves may. We'll have to make sure that all those interviews are held in this realm, not theirs. You're safe enough here but I wouldn't bet money on your chances of living longer than a minute in their realm." Namach explained.

At the doorway someone coughed politely. "About that."

Rahkesh, Daray, and Sharahak all swung around to stare at the five elves who walked in like they owned the place. Namach didn't turn, or even blink. Nor did he conjure any new chairs.

All five were dressed in elegant leather and bloodmetal armor, green, black, gold, and white, and radiating an almost-painful amount of magic. None of them carried any weapons, but Rahkesh didn't need his thunderbird animagus to tell him that at least two were death dragons. The first of these, Ferradiar, was in front and talking, unconcerned at their surprise. The other death dragon had stopped by the door and was leaning against the wall, watching everyone with a scowl.

"I was wondering when you would show up. Might want to watch out for the inner wards next time. You got around the others just fine but you tripped the sonar-based one." Namach said, finally turning with a rather smug grin.

"My inept students outside tripped the sonar-based ward. We did not." Ferraidar corrected archly. "However good you are at not jumping when startled you did not know that we" he waved a hand at the other four "were here. As for the students outside…they'll all be going back to basic training for a month to correct that oversight."

"How many did you bring?"

"Thirty." Ferraidar said. Namach's eyes narrowed with fury.

"There are thirty half-trained cadets stumbling around my property?"

"Elves do not stumble." Ferraidar corrected, conjuring up five elegant silver and white wood chairs with a flick of one hand. "I thought it would be an interesting training opportunity." Namach blinked then snarled out loud, a deep growl rumbling out from him. "Oh hush. You will be able to gloat at the lot of them for a long time." Ferraidar told him.

"What do you want?" Namach growled curtly.

"To meet a most interesting trans-species dislocation. We have no records of anyone going completely from vampire to demon before now." Ferraidar told Sharahak, "Our young Ateres here is just a partial." Daray frowned but kept quiet. "I am Ferraidar, commander of the elven military. The others here are some of our researchers and analysts."

_Researchers an analysts my tail!_ Sygra hissed to Rahkesh as she wound up a bedpost to settle atop his ankles. Rahkesh was sitting Indian-style and the snake coiled between his feet. _Researchers and analysts do not carry death dragons in their souls. If they're analysts and researchers then I'm a garter snake. _Rahkesh stroked her gently and tried not to grin. Only two of these were death dragons, so only part of it was probably an outright lie.

Rahkesh was a little surprised that only two were death dragons, but he guessed that they thought that was more than enough for one demon. And truly they had nothing to be worried about. Nor did any of the vampires in this time. Sharahak was by nature quite, unobtrusive, and had a generally submissive nature that made him little threat to anyone who didn't go out of their way to bother him. Sharahak could certainly handle himself well in a fight if he had to, but he was about as non-confrontational as any vampire could be. His switch to a demon body hadn't changed that.

"You were all watching in the cavern then?" Sharahak asked cautiously.

"Hmm. An interesting battle." Ferraidar said, one of the other elves said something in elvish to the rest that drew laughter. "True it was poorly done, but that is just compared to how we fight, and we are trained for combat with demons." Ferraidar agreed with the other four, in english. "You are not a trained demon sorcerer then?" He asked Sharahak.

"No. Their rituals and magics…call for a lot of mortal bloodshed." Sharahak said with a shrug.

"Good. We might have had to kill you if you were." Ferraidar said as calmly as though he were announcing that the sun was shining. Sharahak stared.

"Drop the dramatics." Namach said.

"I was not being dramatic. If he was a sorcerer then he would have had to enjoy their magics and he would have had to swear a soul-binding oath to the demon central council." Ferraidar said. "Did the travel between realms cause you any harm?"

"No, not particularly."

"In that case our analysts would like a copy of your memories, or at least some of them, when you get back to your proper time."

"I think I can do that. But I was there for a thousand years."

"Do not worry about that. Our ways of copying memories will find everything, including things your memory has apparently forgotten. Our magics could take an exact second by second replay of your entire life without any harm to you, a thousand years, excepting anything you would like to keep to yourself, will not be a problem at all." Ferraidar assured him. Rahkesh thought it highly unlikely that the elves would actually leave anything out if Sharahak requested it be kept private.

"Very well." Sharahak said, obviously not knowing what else to say. Rahkesh had to pity him a bit, it wasn't as though there was any way to get out of it.

"Normally we would invite you to our realm to discuss the demons with our people there, but Tristan is, unfortunately, correct about young elves being impulsive and we can be a bit violent at times." Ferraidar admitted, drawing a snort from the vampire.

"A bit violent?" Namach asked dryly. "Anyone who calls vampires blood thirsty never met an elf."

"The difference is that with you they mean it literally." Ferraidar said. "And I do not think going to one of the elven bases on earth is going to work either."

"Because you don't want anyone knowing where they are." Namach added. "Never mind that as the head of the vampires, official or not, I'd be going along and the council doesn't want me anywhere near any of their bases."

"There is reason for that." Ferraidar muttered. "And precedent for the problem involved."

"Easily intimidated are they?' Namach asked. Ferraidar ignored him.

"So we will have to find another location." Sharahak nodded, Namach cut in and took over the negotiating.

"Since your Earth bases are out of the question we'll use one of my estates." Namach said. Sharahak looked relieved.

"That will do fine. It is not as though we have trouble getting into any of them." Ferraidar agreed with a gentle smile at Namach's growl.

Outside the window someone screamed.

"Better go get your students before they're all maimed." Namach smirked.

"If they were stupid enough to fall for any of your traps I will maim them myself." Ferraidar replied. Sharahak, looking back and forth as the two verbally sparred, stopped before his neck started to hurt and raised an eyebrow at Rahkesh, who gave a small shrug and a grin.

"Not their fault I'm clever." Namach said airily.

"There is only so much cleverness to be had in the brain of an animated corpse." Ferraidar replied. "I think you will need time to settle into the world again, it _has_ changed a lot." He told Sharahak, pointedly ignoring the furious vampire in front of him. "However since your world has about three months before the next planned invasion sooner would be better."

"Three months?" Rahkesh asked, finally talking. The five elves all got very smug.

"We were working our own magic in that cavern. A blanket enchantment that went through the portal then expanded. It created some horrible weather problems, firestorms, earthquakes, general mayhem. And we added a few touches to your cute little pixies, which was an excellent idea by the way. When the demons die from the Heartsfail slivers their magic with explode. It will feed off of their deaths and drag other magic in, creating a vortex. As it draws magic in it creates a hurricane like structure with magic wrapped tight around it, but never fully going through. They can get very big. The destruction will take some time to undo." Ferraidar explained.

"We do this sort of thing regularly, but this time we added a cloaking enchantment behind it all to block portals from functioning. Those are very difficult enchantments and we do not use them often because it leaves so many of our best sorcerers drained. The demons have their own sorcerers and in order to work out enough levels and shielding to keep them from disabling everything we have to put a lot into it, in both time and power." One of the other elves explained. "We have given you three months. If we can do more we will, but the portals closed were only the ones to your realm. The demons are still invading other worlds, ours. Those attacks are mostly not occurring through portals, but rather all on the same plane of existence, which means we cannot really block them magically and have to fight it out. We are not terribly worried about those because there is little doubt we'll win, but we can only spare so much to help you. The demon's intention is to keep us busy, and unfortunately at present they are doing it rather well. Though we have not had any injuries yet it has diverted most of our fighters and sorcerers."

"Thank you for what you did then. Any ideas on what we can do?" Rahkesh asked.

"Train an army." Ferraidar replied. "Beyond that, no. I would say that there is a way out of this simply because our seers seem to think your species will not be completely enslaved and exterminated, but they do not know what to _do_."

"Helpful of them." Namach sighed, but he seemed more resigned than annoyed. "The best chance of finding a way out would be to give all the information we have to the public. Make every member of every affected species aware of the problem. The more minds the better, and I don't need to tell anyone that the most creative minds are usually not found in bureaucracies or in government of any sort. Get the public involved, take ideas from everyone. Pick out the best and release them for feedback and general discussion. See if any diamonds roll out of the muck."

"It'll be a nightmare to organize that." Rahkesh said.

"Species by species basis, let everyone manage their own. We might just find something interesting. Somebody's got to have a good enough imagination to find an answer." Namach replied. Rahkesh thought that this seemed entirely too hopeful. Namach had much more faith in the combined minds of the world than he did. If the elven seers said there was a solution, but they didn't know what, then there had to be a solution. It was probably a glaringly obvious one too, it always was. What they needed was someone who was capable of seeing the glaringly obvious, and that was a much more unusual ability than most would believe.

The elves left after a half-hour question and answer session with Sharahak, that proceeded with more calm and politeness than Rahkesh had thought them capable of. Upon being informed by a laughing Namach that half of his students had fallen victim to the numerous traps covering the forests beyond the walls of the palace Ferraidar had flown into a rage. Eventually he calmed enough to stop cursing and retrieved them with a few magical commands. Fifteen elves promptly came falling out of thin air, all of them bleeding heavily and rather disheveled. With a tired sigh and a few more curses about the "inept youngsters these days" their commander cast a magical net around the lot of them and dragged them off back to the elven realm.

Rahkesh, Daray and Sharahak watched from the balcony of Rahkesh's room, a safe distance above and away from the elves, while Namach laughed and toasted their retreating backs, Ferraidar smirked back and flipped him off before vanishing. A second later a snarl of rage echoed from Namach as he found his goblet of blood turned to fruit juice.

"Grandmother records their arguments whenever she can. Apparently those two are the star comedy act of the last several thousand years." Daray said, watching Namach hurl itching and wart-raising hexes into the quickly vanishing portal the elves had used. The bright blue glow vanished and ancient vampire went back into the palace. "She's got a whole library full of recordings. Naturally Namach and Ferraidar have been trying to find an erase it all ever since they learned she has it."

"Which of course results in more entertainment. I suppose if you're going to live forever you have to find some way to amuse yourself." Rahkesh said.

"Something like that." Daray agreed.

"Good-for-nothing pointy-eared wretches." Namach said, walking back into the room.

"How young were those?" Rahkesh asked.

"Very young, none were much more than two hundred. About the equivalent of a twenty year old mortal. Ferraidar must have annoyed the Council again to get assigned a training patrol of elflings."

"And he of course brought them here." Rahkesh said, thinking to himself that bringing an untrained patrol to the home of the world's most powerful vampire made _so_ much sense, right?

"One of them is the child of a Council member. He's expressing his displeasure at having them around. I'm sure his report to the Council will include some suitably snarky comments that he doesn't need children to interview mysterious new demons."

"He knew that your wards would hurt them." Rahkesh stated.

"I am, naturally, always ready to help embarrass a member of the elven High Council. I love having a reason to gloat at our high and mighty patrons from another universe. They need a good kick occasionally."

"And Ferraidar gets one over the Council, they won't be attempting to order him about any time soon." Rahkesh said, amused. "And they can't even complain about it since they sent the elflings for him to train, knowing what his duties are, and _he_ wasn't the one who hurt them."

"And that. I will be writing a few gloating letters this evening." Namach agreed with a smirk. "I think I need to make a new set of offensive wards and attached their triggers to elf magic."

"Oh I don't know. Very scary super-vicious anti-human aliens from another universe…sounds like your average muggle sci-fi film." Rahkesh said, "and the humans always win in those." He added with a grin. Namach laughed.

"Someone forgot to tell them about that part." Daray said.

"Hmm. Tell me, when they were telling us about their other planets being invaded, how closely were the ones sitting behind me listening?" Namach asked. Since the elves had been sitting in a semi-circle he'd only been able to see two of them. Which, Rahkesh had noted, were the two he thought were death dragons, Ferraidar and another who hadn't spoken a single word the whole time they'd been there.

"Ah…not much?" Rahkesh guessed. Daray and Sharahak shrugged in agreement.

"Interesting." Namach said. The other three traded quizzical looks but the ancient did not elaborate.

"The elves are probably the most powerful magical beings around right?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes."

"And massive magical undertakings are not much of an issue to them."

"Also correct."

"But they can only give us three months?" Rahkesh asked dubiously.

"It's the nature of the magic." Namach explained. "yes they could wipe out most life on this planet easily enough. But that's just massive destruction. Blocking the demons isn't a matter of power, it's a matter of building a precise network of magic to block every portal. That takes time. Endurance and a lot of power, and time. An artist can paint an entire canvas black with a few strokes of a big brush, but creating a photo-quality painting of a tree takes time."

"They're prescient."

"Yes they are. They often know what they should do to achieve a desired result, but they don't know _why_ doing that will work." Namach said. "Their ability to see the future is based off of pure instinct."

"They still knew the demons were coming." Rahkesh argued.

"Certainly. And they let them." Namach agreed. "They're allowing the demons to attack because it will gain them some result that they want."

"Any chance we know what result?"

"No. And I don't think they actually know either. They know that allowing the demons to attack our world will force us to do something that will turn out good for them, and hopefully us, in the end."

"Not a lot to go on." Rahkesh muttered. Namach smirked, but did not seem amused.

"Keeps life interesting. I am not overly concerned. You heard that they are certain of eventually victory in the other battles taking place between them and the demons. Therefore the continuation of their species is certain. As their Champion it is up too Ferraidar to protect and preserve his species first, in the best state possible. However once he has done that he's supposed to then work to ensure the safety of other sentient magical life. They've already got their future set. Now they're working on ours and have apparently decided that a demon invasion is the way to our best possible future." Namach explained. "It could also be that the attacks the demons have launched really are that bad. Only a handful of elves are death dragons, only the elite. They can get around easily enough, but the others travel slower. And locking a piece of magic into place covering the portals really does take a lot, never mind the difficulty in creating it.

Part of the problem is that all other methods of containing the demons have been tried, and eventually been torn down in such a way that they can't be done again. Many times they've been locked away, the last being the attempt with the Seven Seals. So now we need a new way to do it. There's also a good chance that they managed to create more portals in this world recently, I'll know when I can view the memories of that lead sorcerer. It's like trying to cover every hole in a sieve with microscopic thread. And the ones doing the weaving plan on eventually letting the water out."

"They couldn't just come out and say that?" Rahkesh asked.

"Of course not." Namach said, highly amused now, "that would make too much sense." The ancient chuckled and then he changed the subject. "Sharahak now that you're rested we should start going over what the world is like now."

"I brewed a memory potion earlier." The demon said, "I suppose it is a very different place."

"Just a bit." Rahkesh agreed, thinking it was all too likely that Sharahak would take a century to adjust, and then he'd have to keep pace with the changing times. Which were changing very fast, especially with the muggles and their new technologies.

A half hour later, as Namach carefully explained the industrial revolution, and then how a light bulb worked, Rahkesh decided that it might take a good deal more than a century to explain everything. He'd never considered before how difficult it was to explain his civilization to someone who'd left Earth a thousand years before. Being raised in the muggle, and then in the magical world, it all seemed very normal and common-sense to him. Sharahak, despite the memory potion, was clearly trying hard and struggling, to grasp concepts he'd never heard of before. He asked questions constantly, and when these led into a discussion of what atoms were Rahkesh, getting a head ache, stopped following the conversation and went back to working on healing his magics, which at least required no such intense thought and more instinctive magic.

XX

The room in which Namach had decided to have Daray attempt his transformation had been a cave originally. However at some point Namach had decided that he might some day have a need for a very secure chamber. The walls were reinforced with concrete, a magical metal made from steel infused with potions, titanium, and covered with long trailing pieces of what Rahkesh had on first inspection thought to be bloodmetal. Then he felt it stir to life and realized that Namach had crossed bloodmetal with Guardian Vines to create an almost-living metal-like being that manifested all of his power and which he could control. The bloodmagic history books mentioned only a small handful of people who had ever managed to mix bloodmetal with living flesh not their own, naturally Namach was the most renowned, but Rahkesh had never seen any of it until now.

"The vines will take in any excess magic to keep it from harming him or us." Namach said. Like the bloodmagic rooms at Akren the main cavern had a small one-way window, the room they were in was behind this, looking in. Daray was lying on his back in the middle of the large cavern, eyes closed.

Sharahak was standing beside Namach, he would join Daray once he finished his pre-metamorphosis meditation, but right now Daray's mind had few walls and didn't need another presence clouding things. Rahkesh went around to Sharahak's other side and took one of the seats. He was up and moving, which was a vast improvement, but only barely. He was limping heavily and the thick bandages around his wounds made movement difficult. Sygra, wrapped around his neck and over his shoulders, was monitoring him to make sure he didn't over-stress himself.

"Sharahak I never got the chance to ask earlier, whatever happened to Enireth?" Rahkesh asked. He'd been fond of the young dragon during the short time he'd known him.

"He stayed on with the Chachapoyaro his whole life." Sharahak replied. "He was alive and well when I left, he'd just barely passed maturity then. He didn't have any family, didn't know of any others of his kind, and nor did the Chachapoyaro. He never fully recovered from what the Inca did to him you know. When I left he was enjoying himself helping the Xuelhuala train to combat dragon attacks. Those warrirors just adored him, as much as they ever did Nicodemus. The two of them were an amazing team. There were other dragons around so Enireth had some contact with his own kind. He and Nicodemus would go to meet them sometimes, and he and the weather mages had a grand time flying around learning about the upper atmosphere." Sharahak said with a wistful smile.

Rahkesh grinned, he could just imagine that. Nicodemus had insisted on personally overseeing Enireth's healing. He, Enireth, and Rahkesh had often gone flying together, the two humans on the dragons' back, often with Daray and Sharahak flying alongside. He wondered briefly if Enireth could have joined the time-frozen army Nicodemus had written of, but pushed the thought away before his still-mending mind magics leaked anything to the two very perceptive ancient beings with him.

Daray sat up, then rose to his feet and nodded. Sharahak went in to join him. Satan flew down from the roof and landed on Namach's shoulder, making little squeaking noises that sounded rather distressed. Namach scratched him behind the ears and the magical bat settled with a whine.

Daray transformed into a demon, painfully slowly, growling and whining in pain. He looked half-dead. Satan whined again in sympathy. The dark demon settled in the center of the room. Sharahak measured off a few paces away, a safe distance. Daray took a large container of his blood and drew out two overlapping spirals on the floor. One to spiral in towards himself and one to spiral away, they connected at their outermost points to form a circle. He put the container aside and went to the center.

Once in the center Daray folded his wings down and crouched. Sharahak, on all fours, began to hum. It was a drawn out continuous hum that never varied. Slowly the cream and grey demon began to sway, still humming softly. The hum shifted up, taking on a note of urgency. Slowly a reddish glow grew around him.

Then Daray, eyes closed, deep in meditation, took up the humming. For several moments the two demons hummed a synchronized song. It was monotone, with only a few shifts that Rahkesh couldn't follow. The vibrations abruptly shifted, becoming magic enhanced, and Rahkesh could almost feel it through the walls. Daray's voice rose echoing a counterpart to Sharahak. Daray's hum was deeper, but slowly began to rise while Sharahak kept up a steady hum. As Daray grew louder his mouth opened and the hum turned to a full song. His head arched back and his scales darkened as though they were drinking in the light around him. A deep warbling note followed by a long higher call, then white light sprang up around him.

Magic shot from his claws, the spines around his neck filled out and began to glow at the tips. Tiny bits of magic, trailing streams of white in their wake, crackled up, spiraling around him in the cloud. More white magic leaped from the spines on his back and tail, shooting stars that raced around in spirals forming a cocoon of light. More white jumped out from his wing-claws. Flying pieces whirling around him, wraping him in streams of white magic like comet-tails.

Finally at a point above his head two of the tiny white comets collided to form a loop. Another joined the loop, then another, until all were connected to each other, each loop spinning on its own axis and revolving around to touch other loops. The speed increased until the loops and spirals blurred into a mass of white magic.

Sharahak's hum rose again, higher and more powerful, the urgency growing. Daray's song dropped, then rose, then dropped, then rose. His voice shifted until it was closer to a wail then became harsh and brittle, like frozen glass, a long sharp note that seemed to stretch forever.

Outside the room Namach closed off some of the sound escaping from the chamber as the level began to make their ears hurt. The metallic guardian vines writhed across the walls, drinking in loose magic spilling away from the transforming demon. Satan had gone silent and had his eyes shut tight, but his body was swaying in a slow movement in time with Sharahak's.

Sharahak now began to change his song, slowly the sound became insistent, brilliantly high and full-throated, but not a tremble to it, a continuous sound. How the demons were possibly managing this without ever drawing a breath Rahkesh couldn't tell, it must have been done with magic. Daray's voice snapped to a roar, an abrupt bellow that made Rahkesh jump.

The white magic turned black, black as night. Bits and piece snapped off and sprang away, then shot inwards, striking at the demon wrapped in the magic. Daray's roar continued, deepening, and then slowly becoming higher pitched. At the same time a deep growled reverberated from where he was within the black magic. The roared turned to a howl and the magic went red.

Bright brilliant red light, Rahkesh shielded his eyes as it flared, the whirling mass turning to neon red flames, spiraling around and around in continuous loops and erupting out from the ground around Daray where his blood encircled him on the floor. Sharahak, having led Daray's mind to this critical point, fell silent. Traditionally another Alpha would have led him through this, but now Daray would have to find the last part himself, Sharahak could help him no more.

The sound of claws screeching across impenetrable rock broke through the howls and growling. The growl vanished and the howled turned to a fierce roar, rising and falling in a slowly increasing rhythm. As the ups and downs grew closer together they coalesced into blast of noise somewhere in the middle.

New flames appeared, white ones around the floor. The magic crackling around stayed brilliantly red and flaming in every direction with the spirals on the floor turned white. Beyond the red flames the air grew brighter, light springing from nothingness. Beyond even this light everything went dark and the shadows reached out, dancing through the room. The darkness closed in on the bright red, held off only by the white glow.

Then the flames leaped, throwing away both light and darkness and the fire exploded around Daray. Daray's song faded to a lower volume and changed to a song that _felt_ like a spiral, higher, lower in slow progression, then higher again. As his voice dropped the light and darkness returned. Daray broke the song with a terrific scream. A terrible fierce sound that cracked like a whip.

Massive glossy black wings erupted upwards, arcing high above the red flames. The long spiked black tail whipped out, swinging away, Daray's huge claws appeared beyond the flames, shiny black. The fire dropped and became thin spirals of flame again, slowly disconnecting.

Daray's head tilted upwards, screaming. Black scales gleamed and the thick black neck spines were fully extended. As the spirals of fire withdrew and slowly vanished the screaming stopped and turned to an aching mesmerizing howl. The light and darkness vanished, the white glow faded from the floor, and the last of the fire disappeared.

Daray had not changed much during his transformation; his was bigger now, but not by a lot. His scales were once again their stunning obsidian, gleaming and shining. The black leather and tiny scales on his wings were black and no longer peeling. His wing claws dark. The glow vanished from his neck spines and they relaxed, shrinking down. His eye ridges had flared, almost artistically, a few new horns appeared, short and stubby around his brow. The scale pattern on his wings had changed, thicker now along the top between wing claws, which were quite a bit larger. The muscles around where his wings joined his power full shoulders rolled under broad armor-like scales, smaller flexible scales, and leathery black skin. His tail spear had changed and now his tail scales stood up sideways, sharp edges flattening out into sharp little blades along the sides.

The scales on the tail flattened down, relaxing, the scales along his shoulder and back, which had shifted to form long blades running lengthwise, also settled flat and smooth. The wing claws relaxed back a bit. Daray dropped his head and turned, wings still up above him.

Now came the potentially dangerous part, a newly metamorphosed Alpha was extremely aggressive. Sharahak was lying on the floor, half curled up, watching Daray cautiously. Namach took Satan off his shoulder and rose, walking to the door the ancient released the bat into the room. Satan winged right over to his master.

Daray's head shot up as the bat flew over. Satan circled once, then landed tentatively on one massive wing, then climbed down the wing and up Daray's shoulder. Perched on top of his shoulder Satan gave a strange high pitched call. Daray's tail lashed, then settled, then flicked again. The wings relaxed a bit. Tilting his head down Daray nose the bat gently, then sighed and twisted around, scratching the last of the dried blood of the floor. Pausing his settled and began to examine himself, going over each claw and scale. Finally he raised his head again and looked around at Sharahak.

"Is it done then?" He asked wearily. Sharahak nodded and rose, Daray showed no inclination to attack but merely wandered over, butting his against the cream and grey demon playfully.

XX

Rahkesh rolled and lunged up, slamming his shoulder into the black demon's gut and flipping Daray over his back. Daray landed awkwardly on one wing and twisted to avoid breaking it. Springing off of powerful hind legs he followed Rahkesh's movement. Rahkesh barely turned around in time to avoid him. Wing claws flashed past centimeters from his face. Rahkesh swung his knife around and slipped it into the cuticle of the wing claw, tearing in between the scales, then leaped back.

Rahkesh wiped sweat out of his eyes. It was just past noon and even indoors it was hot. He was shirtless and sweating enough that he'd taken off his shoes because they were soaked through. Daray, being undead, was not at all bothered by the oppressive heat and humidity, Rahkesh's lungs ached.

Daray snarled and spun again, raising his wings and pouncing. Rahkesh went down and rammed a taser into Daray's neck hairs and activated it. Daray's jaws snapped shut with a shriek. Rahkesh kicked him hard in the groin. Even if demons didn't have obvious genitals it still hurt.

Daray rolled away with a shout. Coming to all four the demon shrieked at him. Rahkesh laughed. Daray sat down and glared.

Off to one side Namach and Sharahak were laughing as well, Daray tilted his nose upwards and sniffed at the two ancients, his tail flicking about like a cat's.

They had one more day before they got back to the normal time, and Rahkesh and Daray were using it to work out and practice. Testing each other's strengths and weaknesses to see if either was still injured or not completely functional. Rahkesh had been pushing Daray's agility and magical defenses, while Daray had been going after Rahkesh's most recent injuries in hopes of finding a spot that hadn't fully recovered. Rahkesh's cheek ached, but the wound was healed, his ribs and back were still a little sore, and he was favoring his leg where the demon had bitten him, but not enough to really matter. The play fighting was also stretching his stiffened scar tissue and working muscles still healing from being torn by demon teeth.

"Our big tough Alpha demon brought down by a mortal?" Rahkesh jeered. Daray blew flames out his nose.

"Rahkesh if you really wanted to grope me there are better ways. And _please _not in front of the ancients." He replied.

Rahkesh collapsed to the floor laughing. "Only you would confuse a kick in the groin with a grope. Like it that way do you? Shall I tell Fengyang?"

The two ancients off to the side started laughing again as Daray roared and lunged. Rahkesh sprang away, still laughing hard enough to make his ribs hurt. He twisted his wand around and hurled skin shriveling hexes behind him. Daray brushed them aside with his wings. Apparently in his new form that was possible Rahkesh realized this was going to be very difficult.

So he conjured throwing stars and animated them into hurling themselves at Daray. This he followed with a thick mist which he wrapped around the demon. Then he started bouncing stinging hexes off the floor.

Daray used his own magic, throwing away the mist and blasting apart the throwing stars. Rahkesh had closed in while he was moving the mist and as Daray charged out Rahkesh flung himself onto the demon's back. Gripping tight at one wing joint he swung himself up between Daray's wings. Conjuring sharp wires he pulled Daray's wings together. Daray rolled, Rahkesh dove off, rolled on one shoulder, and came up under Daray, a wire tight around the demon's neck. Daray's jaws closed around Rahkesh's head.

"I think I won. It's a noose, tightens instantly when I cut the spell." Rahkesh smirked. "So if I die your head gets cut off."

Daray's growl, coming as it did around Rahkesh's skull, seemed awkward. Then Daray backed off, spitting.

"Your hair tastes disgusting."

Namach and Sharahak started laughing again. Rahkesh, laughing and catching his breath smacked Daray over the head and pushed him away.

"Hrumph." Daray muttered, stalking away, head held high.

"Any noticeable differences?" Sharahak asked.

"I move faster, my muscles and bones seem stronger. I have better balance, and I can sometimes sense what he's about to do ahead of him doing it." Daray said.

"You'll continue to change for a few weeks, it is different for every Alpha demon, but don't expect anything major." Sharahak said. Rahkesh slowly got his feet, his leg and back hurting.

"You're still not fully healing." Sharahak observed needlessly.

"Yeah well, demon magic and venom and all." Rahkesh said, shrugging it off despite the worry in the back of his mind.

"You should be healed." Namach said. "There's no venom or magic left in you." The ancient vampire conjured a long bench and waved Rahkesh over.

"Lie down. The other healing spells aren't working so I'm going to try something different."

Rahkesh stretched out on his stomach and watched as Namach sat on another bench beside him and raised his hands over the new scars on his back. Magic flew from the ancient's hand, crackling gently across Rahkesh's back. Grey/silver lines began to appear like elaborate scrollwork, winding over Rahkesh's skin, spreading out until his entire body was covered in silvery lines. Rahkesh examined the ones on his hand, they didn't follow his bloodmagic lines, this was advanced healing magic that showed the exact lines of every tendon and muscle, and the flows of magic that filled that body of any magical being.

"Your mind magics are more or less intact." Namach asked.

"Yes." Most of his mental shields were restored to full strength.

"You haven't worked on your bloodmagic."

"No." Rahkesh said, he was still having trouble accessing it. Everything had healed, and it was working fine, but he couldn't feel it properly yet.

The other two came over to watch as Namach flicked his fingers and the silvery lines deepened and shifted, forming a more three dimensional image.

"Here." Namach said, "this is it. Your body as healed and your magics are more or less stable and healed, but they aren't connected."

"What's stopping them?" Daray asked curiously, leaning over to look at the spots Namach was now manipulating, shifting the grey and silver lines.

"Dead flesh. The demon venom killed some sections of muscle. His body should have reabsorbed that magically, it hasn't. Probably because his magic can't feel its there." Namach examined the silvery lines for a few more seconds. "Rahkesh I'm going to just remove those little dead pieces and regrow them."

"Will that hurt?"

"No. No nerve ending alive. And with this type of healing magic it is possible to shut down the nerves that might be affected."

"Go ahead." Rahkesh said. Namach carefully placed his fingers across the silver strands and began to move them, pushing the silver lines slowly until they circled the dead pieces, then he shifted until his fingernails caught the lines and gave a little flick. The lines across Rahkesh's skin spasmed and four small areas went completely blank.

Lightning snapped and thunder crashed, Daray and Sharahak backed away as Rahkesh's thunderbird surged to life violently. Namach growled in irritation and waited. Rahkesh closed his eyes and sank inwards forcibly suppressing his natural violent reaction to foreign magic. Finally the thunderbird settled and retreated. Rahkesh always reacted badly to foreign magic, now he carefully calmed that reaction and soothed his animagus away. Normally he would not have reacted so badly when he was awake and fully conscious, but the dark energy that spilled off the ancient vampire was enough to make his animagus feel threatened.

Namach placed the silvery strands back where they had been, and pulled other ones towards them, until silvery lines joined at each point of missing flesh. "Rahkesh, try to find the dead areas, using magic."

Rahkesh focused on his back, and felt the silvery lines brighten, slowly he searched until he identified the missing pieces. It was an extension of mind magic, being able to sense every piece of the body. Locating the missing bits was surprisingly easy.

"Now, push raw energy into those spots, and recreate the living flesh." Namach said. Rahkesh called on his magic, and felt a sharp pulse, which he threw into the gaps. Catching it again Rahkesh remembered the feeling of working muscle and life and energized the surrounding flesh. Imagining the regrowth in his mind Rahkesh pictured the muscle growing and filling the empty spaces, and slowly it happened.

Rahkesh blinked and opened his eyes. All pain was gone from his back, and his leg. Had he healed the leg as well without realizing it? Namach had moved to his leg and chuckled suddenly.

"Another instinctive reaction apparently. I was expecting some healing, but not a complete job." Namach said, "try to move it." Rahkesh flexed his leg and was surprised to find it worked perfectly. Namach slowly removed his own magic, and the silvery lines faded away.

"Without that dead flesh in the way your magic and body should reconnect completely." Namach said. "It is very odd that you didn't felt it. Perhaps some reactionary affect of whatever is off with your bloodmagic."

"I think I need to talk to some other parselmouths about that." Rahkesh said, standing cautiously. He put his full weight on his previously injured leg, and found it healed.

"I doubt they'll know much. Unless you find another basilisk." Namach said. Rahkesh nodded, knowing that there was just one other basilisk, and he wasn't anyone Rahkesh would be seeing anywhere but a battlefield.

"Is your magic working fully then?" Daray asked.

"It seems so." Rahkesh said with a shrug.

"Oh good." Daray smirked. Rahkesh instantly went defensive. Rahkesh threw up a shield as he sensed magic moving, and stinging and tickling hexes bounced around him, a couple hitting one foot that hadn't made it behind the shield in time.

Daray laughed and leaped away from several thrown weapons and a blinding spell. He sent back a burning spell and a runny-nose curse. Rahkesh retaliated with a finger-nail growing spell and Daray yelped as his nail extended almost a meter. Rahkesh dodged a bruising curse and spell that would have turned his skin glow-in-the-dark and attacked again. Daray dodged out the door, a last spell turning Rahkesh orange. Rahkesh snarled and followed him out, spells flying.

Behind them the two ancients had avoided the fight and now turned to listen to the battle. Sharahak chuckled and turned to the older vampire.

"I don't suppose they'll bother repairing anything they break?"

"Nothing to break. This wing was meant for dueling." Namach replied. "Did you notice Rahkesh's reactions to foreign magic when he drank the dragon's blood?" Sharahak blinked at the change in subject, then thought about it.

"Yes. Well, I didn't. One of the sorcerers there noted that he had probably survived because he panicked when he felt the invasion and took control of the reaction subconsciously, then gave the worst of the magical discharge from the dragon/human clash to me. But he funneled it into healing magic. And since I was a vampire and almost dead any blood I consumed was automatically altered towards healing."

"That must have been some panic to manage that."

"Enough to send him into seizures bad enough to almost kill him when he tried to first reject, then completely absorb the remaining dragon magic." Sharahak agreed. No one had mentioned it to Rahkesh, but the cave rock had been so badly damaged it had collapsed not long after. "How did he manage to absorb the dragon magic? We could never figure it out."

"Fear. Not surprisingly. He almost died trying to avoid it. I think he made it part of himself because, for whatever reason, he _couldn't_ kill himself. So he defeated it another way, taking it over and making part of him.

"He would have killed himself first?"

"His fear is intense enough that suicide is one of the first reactions he has. It does make sense on some level, on a very twisted panic-attack level. His immediate reaction is to attack. But if it's an opponent he can't beat he switches to suicide instantly because if he dies fast enough then his foe won't gain anything." Namach explained. Sharahak thought that over for a few moments, watching the way Rahkesh had left thoughtfully.

"What caused that reaction to form?"

"That's the question isn't it? I've never encountered such an extreme terror before." Namach said.

-

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Please review, as always. Reviews feed the muse.

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**I will be continuing this fic. Book 7 is out but you'll find little of it here, this is AU and I will continue it.**

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	15. Chapter 15

Xiaron – Thank you for looking that up

Nenagh24 – oh thank you, high praise indeed. I love to keep everyone guessing.

Aku – I love Stargate. And yeah I can just hear O'Niel saying that.

Hardwork – Voldemort will be dead soon, he's just mucking things up now.

James walker – I plan on getting it in there at some point.

Illiad – no location doesn't matter. You'll see those other species soon.

Angel.of.Blood –I'm a big fan of John Denver, the Dixie Chicks, and Paul Simon

I know I planned to update sooner than this, however a hurricane interfered, sorry I can't control the weather.

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Chapter 15

Rahkesh shut his anatomy textbook and rubbed his eyes, feeling the onset of a headache. His healing class was a beginner level but it was called a second level class simply because everyone had to have passed a CPR class and a basic first aid and basic trauma test before entering. If he hadn't passed he would have had to learn that stuff in a two week course. As it was he'd learned that on his own, from a book, while in the Room of Requirement. So now he was into real magical healing, and the first thing any healer learned was the basic anatomy of various life forms. They were working on mammals at the moment. Basic similarities between them, they wouldn't get to specifics for humans, and other like beings, until the next level class. Aside from basic anatomy they were also covering simple healing spells that worked on just about everything, spells for healing bruises, scrapes, clean breaks, and some other useful spells designed for such things as removing objects from inside the nose, eyes, ears, and throat. He had a test coming soon on those spells. The class would get to try healing each other. Rahkesh was not looking forward to this. It meant that he would have to be injured so that someone else could try healing him. He'd volunteered to break a finger, just to avoid the possibility of have something put into his eye and some amateur healer trying to remove it. Sure the professor was there in case anything went wrong, and they would fix any problems as a demonstration to the students, and so that potential healers did wind up maimed, but that wasn't reassuring. He'd rather avoid having a splinter stuck in his nose if possible.

An owl flew in the open arched window over the glass doors to the balcony and alighted on the perch next to his desk. Rahkesh looked up and gave a delighted laugh when he recognized Hedwig. The big white owl hooted and hopped along the perch to rub her head on his shoulder. She must have been sent by Ginny, or maybe my Neville or Hermione. Owls could certainly get into Akren, if the person sending them knew of the schools' existence. This was why all attempts to send Harry Potter and owl hadn't worked, the people sending them didn't know that he was at Akren and as a result the owls couldn't get in. And he had warded against them temporarily.

"Hedwig, old friend. It's been far too long. You do look well, Ginny must be taking good care of you." Rahkesh cooed as he removed the letter from her talons. Hedwig hooted agreeably and nipped gently at his fingers. Rahkesh conjured a water bowl and summoned one of Sygra's mice from her cage. "You getting along with the Weasely's?" Hedwig bobbed her head around then twisted it side to side. "Sort of. Could be worse. Perhaps you'll be able to come back soon, would you like that?" Hedwig now nodded and nipped at his nose. Well it wouldn't be too soon. He'd missed his old friend. Though she was still too well known, and he was still being cautious enough that a similarity like having the same type of owl as Harry Potter could be enough, along with his parseltongue ability and the same home country, to prompt the curious to look even closer. Getting Hedwig back would have to wait. If they survived the demon invasion maybe enough time would have passed. He unfolded the letter and recognized Neville's script.

_Dear Harry (or whatever name it is today)_

_Well Luna and Ginny have graduated and are finally "free of school" (Ginny's words). I'm working at a botany research center. It great, we're examining the properties of magical plants and how their magic changes during their lifecycle. I suppose some of this will be invaluable for potion making. Not that I know much about that. _

_Yesterday the Ministry started contacting all the magical research centers in the country, asking for ideas on how to use whatever we're studying to combat demons. The attempted invasion in Mexico has been all over the news, were you there? They didn't say anything about Akren, but you always seem to wind up involved in stuff like that. Everyone's really scared. The aurors have been running everywhere, whenever someone thinks they've found a portal. Of course no one has actually found one yet. _

_Harry what's going on? The papers won't say yet, but it sounds like the demons are actually going to invade. They already said the plague was meant to soften us up, and if we hadn't gone into quarantine so fast we'd all be dead already. Does this mean the demons are really coming, now. Should we start training to fight them? _

_We're all meeting at the Weasley's for dinner Friday night. Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Dean, Sheamus, Fred, George, and a few others. I think Bill and Fluer will be there, and Charlie. And Fluer's sister. Oh and Remus and Tonks were invitied. And maybe even Susan Bones, Hannah Abbott, Terry Boot, Justin Flinch-Fletchley, and Ernie Macmillan, they all left Hogwarts about the time we did by the way. There's a large group of us here, we tried to convince our parents to at least go the same country, and it mostly worked, though Ernie's in Canada and Hannah is in Costa Rica. Any chance you could make it? I know you're probably in on all this demon stuff, you always are. _

_Oh did you hear? Hogwarts is opening again this fall. You have to admire McGonagal, she's pretty tough. All students have to have their blood tested before they board the train. The local vampires are helping. Imagine that. Everyone's so anxious to see their children safe they're letting vampires test them. Pretty neat huh? _

_On another note. Anything about Voldemort? We're still ready to help if we can you know. What's going on with him? The papers don't have anything. I don't suppose he did everyone a favor and jumped off a cliff?_

_Please come, it'll be good to see you again, _

_Neville_

_PS – some of us are working on becoming animagi, are you one?_

Rahkesh smiled at the post script. That would be a nice chat. He'd be happy to help his old friends with their animagi. He was also interested to find out what Hermione was up to. He knew she'd been hired by a Spanish agency charged with getting muggle born children out of the UK but he hadn't heard anything more. Spain wasn't the only nation in Europe that accepted all magical beings and had few magical restrictions, but they were the most active. Ever since the anti-vampire declaration, and the following anti-magical being declaration , and then the passing of several laws against healing spells that used magic that could also be used to harm, the Spanish had risen against the rest of their continent. With government support and encouragement groups aimed at convincing people in other nations that their Ministry was wrong had sprung up everywhere, and even more dedicated to getting people to move to more friendly countries. Spain was having a population boom of such proportions that the government institutions couldn't handle it. The Spanish Ministry had reached out to every ally it could find and had set itself up has a stopping off point for people fleeing the rest of Europe. Since Hermione was still officially working for them, and living in America, and Rahkesh figured she was part of that process, getting people out of Spain before the sheer number of immigrants and refugees overwhelmed them.

He'd have to find the time to get to this dinner, it had been a long time. Now that they weren't following him everywhere and so dependent Rahkesh felt easier having dinner with them. Of course it also helped that they now knew where he was. They didn't know what new name he'd taken, since Harry Potter was obviously not in Akren's public records (which weren't usually entirely truthful anyway). At a school so entrenched in secrecy the idea that anyone would use their real name, even on the public records, was laughable. So much so that Donald Duck was in the Akren public records as a student who'd graduated as a Potions Master and owl animagi, and no one was at all surprised to see that. Even his friends like Daray and Silas hadn't put their real names on that, and they actually used their birth names at school.

He had no intention of telling any of his old friends what his new name was, they didn't need to know. And, at this point, if they even mentioned him within the hearing of a vampire, they might wind up right in the middle of his current mess. The vampires who knew about him and wanted to turn him would jump on the chance to find out more about him, and possibly use his old friends to blackmail him. And so his new identity would remain a secret for as long as he could manage. He also just had a thing for secrecy. It was a survival tactic. But he had allowed them to find out _where_ he was. They might be able to figure out his new name from that, but he would never tell them if their guesses were right. His Hogwarts friends might not entirely approve of what he was doing, but his location wasn't a secret. Akren was known to them now, and the school Luna and Ginny had attended received Akren recruiters every year.

Though Akren remained mostly shrouded in mystery, it had never been a complete unknown except in most of Europe. Their recruiters were allowed into most other schools, perhaps not with real welcome, but they were allowed. Most everyone who knew much about them looked on them with some amount of disapproval. The general public knew that a mysterious brutal school that trained in all magical arts, legal or not, and killed a good portion of its students existed, but much more than that they didn't know, and didn't look to find out, even though more information was available. Plenty inquired further when the recruiters spoke to them, but they usually lost interest at Akren's publicly displayed death toll and the questions stopped around there (which was the intent). Any who did ask further were often turned away by the lawlessness of the school, where students were free to do whatever they wanted to each other, a good portion of it highly criminal. Only those in relevant areas of government or with direct ties to the school knew much about it. And most parents discouraged their children from attending, even if they passed the entrance tests.

Rahkesh supposed that since their last meeting his friends…Hermione…would have done some research on his new school. He would have to be ready to be tolerant of their questions and concerns. There were plenty of horror stories about Akren that were general knowledge. Even with only a casual interest Hermione couldn't have failed to hear those. Mostly those were about cases of rape (not uncommon), or of vampires attacking students in their sleep (even more normal), or of students permanently disabled by classmates so that there would be less job competition (also not uncommon), or of just plain old murder (boringly common). Just about any teacher who taught classes to students of the age when the Akren recruiters took interest had looked into the school, and would happily tell parents about it and its ruthlessly Darwinian attitude that cheerfully ignored students getting torn apart by other students. His friends would undoubtedly be horrified. Rahkesh would, of course, happily tell them that every horror story was probably true, and then tell them how much he loved it there. If they didn't run screaming from the room (a very big if) then they could actually discuss the reasons behind those policies and why he liked it so much.

And he would say nothing of his studies in necromancy. He could tell them about mind magic and healing, and transfiguration, and thread magic and some bloodmagic, but not a word about necromancy. Because then they would only have to look at the public records of the Necromancers Guild to find that training included a little bit of both types of necromancy. And Rahkesh was not prepared to face them on that account. He still hadn't quite figured out how he was going to torture someone to death. He might have to "borrow" another of Hadrian's vampires who bore the dark mark. Though Narcissa Malfoy, still locked away by Alastor Moody, might be an option. Along with any other death eater he could get his hands on…Pettigrew sounded good.

Rahkesh penned a quick reply, saying he'd be delighted to come to dinner, and carefully switched his handwriting to sign it as Harry. He did that so rarely he'd almost forgotten his own signature. Sending the owl off Rahkesh wondered what he'd tell them about the demons. The truth, to start. But should he encourage them to start practicing fighting again?

Of course. When the invasion happened anything that could help them would be worthwhile.

Rahkesh turned with an irritated growl as he sensed another presence in his rooms. A massive pair of black wings and lashing tail made him pause as Daray appeared before the large windows that opened onto his porch. The inky black demon looked as magnificent as always in the sun's glow. Since his transformation Daray's demon form had continued to change bit by bit. Becoming less choppy and more graceful, with an almost feline edge to his movements. The new horns around his head remained short, but the pair on top had altered, elongating and pointing backwards. The new scale patterns protecting his joints had grated as he moved when he'd first metamorphosed. Now they'd been worn smooth and he was almost soundless. His neck had taken on an almost draconic look. But there was no mistaking the wolf/human face for anything else. Nor the snarl the new scale patterns permanently scrawled across his face.

The big demon stalked into the room and leaped onto Rahkesh's couch. He stretched like a cat settling, delicately stepping so as not to tear the fabric, then settled, wings folding over his back, front legs stretched out and his chin resting on them. His tail was too long and draped over the edge of the couch. Rahkesh decided for Daray's birthday he was definitely going to have to get the vampire an exact replica of his couch. Some people liked teddy bears or favorite blankets, Daray had discovered Rahkesh's couch.

"Why a demon?" Rahkesh asked, thinking that if Daray was serious about his other form not being discovered he'd have to be much more discrete.

"Not much of a secret anymore." Daray replied, his voice a mix of the vampire's deep silky tones and demon's rumbling ones. "When I went and attacked in the battle in that cave-portal everyone saw me. And they saw me defending Silas while he and Nuri worked their hypnosis. They can't really defend themselves then, too focused. And so now everyone knows that the Ateres have a demon ally."

"But not that you are a demon." Rahkesh asked to make sure. It probably wouldn't be too long now until everyone knew in any case, but he'd rather not accidentally let it slip when Daray's demon form was still a secret.

"No. Not yet. However it would not seem too odd to have that demon ally still occasionally stopping by to visit the two Ateres still in Akren. So I have a little leeway in transforming."

"Where's Silas?" Rahkesh asked. He hadn't seen Silas since the fight in the cavern.

"I think he's off with Hanashi, if you'd believe it. That pretty little Amadan fae, Haedil's second cousin."

"What's wrong with Hanashi?" Rahkesh though Hanashi was probably one of Akren's brightest. And far more manipulative than her quiet mouse-like presence let on.

"Nothing. She's just the quietest little wall-flower in the school." Daray said with a shrug. Which, as they both knew, was a mask she assumed in public. Silas' interest alone proved that. He would never go after someone so shy unless it was all an act. "And Nuri doesn't like her much."

"Nuri is a cat." Rahkesh observed gently, trying to hide a smile.

"You noticed? So did I." Daray said back sweetly. Then he changed his tone. "Sergio – the Master of Mexico City, has been asking around if you plan on becoming a vampire. He was…most impressed, with your Basilisk and lightning display. I half think he wants to turn you himself. Of course Namach would go ballistic if he even mentioned it, but that hasn't stopped him checking the Akren records and asking around a lot."

"Crap." Rahkesh sighed. He really didn't need more vampires paying attention to him. There were too many who wanted to turn him already. Perhaps someone would tell Sergio that he was happily mortal and staying that way.

"Mmhmm. More attention. You will wind up one of us one day." Daray said smirking, enjoying his friend's despair.

"I will not."

"Oh I think you will, Sergio has undoubtedly been talking to anyone else who has heard of you. He really does want to turn you himself. He seems very admiring of your abilities. Actually "drooling" was the word Namach used after he got back from meeting with Sergio…though that may have been from Namach just about killing him. He's not too happy with Sergio right now. Strangely enough being told off by a vampire two thousand years younger annoyed him."

"I don't care how much they want to turn me, or how high-level the interest is, I'm staying human. I don't find this at all flattering."

"Come to the dark side." Daray intoned in a passable Star Wars imitation.

"Since when did you watch muggle movies?"

"I've got nothing against muggles. Or their idea of entertainment. I like muggles. They taste good and they don't fight back." Daray said. Rahkesh rolled his eyes. Vampires liked to say that they based such things entirely off of the blood of the species in question, which to some extent they probably did. Rahkesh knew though that they weren't quite that shallow, even if they tried so hard to pretend they were. Though in Daray's case it might be true, he was just cliché enough to actually believe that.

"Do you think-" Daray began.

Graaaaalwp.

"What was that?" Rahkesh asked, looking around. Sygra's nose poked out from around the corner of the bathroom door.

_Me. _

_What?_

_Erm…_

_Sygra?_ Rahkesh asked, sniffing the air. Something smelled gross, and vaguely tangy….and vomit like. He went to the bathroom and opened the door. _Sygra?_

_Something I ate. When we were in Ethiopia. _

What happened?" Daray, in vampire form, poked his head in beside Rahkesh and blinked that the brown and yellow lump on the floor. "Gross."

"Something she ate at Namach's place in Ethiopia." Rahkesh said, wrinkling his nose at the mess.

"It's a gnome, of sorts." Daray said. He banished it with a wave of his wand.

_Sygra, why did you eat a gnome?_

_Because it had magical powers and I wanted to see how they tasted._

Rahkesh translated the response to Daray, who broke out laughing and patted Sygra's head.

"You darling would make an excellent vampire." He told her. Rahkesh sighed and opened a window, casting a spell to vent the smell out of the room, great, now both his familiar and best friend thought that the best way to test a new species powers was to eat them.

"As I was going to say, do you think there is any possibility to rallying Europe to fight?" Daray asked.

"Daray I only ever lived in Britain, I don't know a damn thing about anyplace else. And rally who? They've lost something like seventy-five percent of the population." Rahkesh said tiredly.

"Well I was thinking that the only thing really standing in their way at this point is their problem with that Voldemort thingy. If he were gone they might be able to focus on getting rid of the plague and moving forward. Surely they've learned their lesson?"

"Maybe. I suppose anyone that was there when the plague started was one of those who had issues with magical beings other than humans. They're mostly dead. It's possible, but you'd have to talk those that left into going back." Rahkesh followed Daray back into the sitting room. "Why the concern?"

"Well the way I see it Europe is the major weak point in any defense against the demons. So, however problematic, they're the spot that needs work. I would say most of Africa is worse off, but there's _never_ been a portal discovered anyplace outside of Egypt and South Africa. Everywhere else hasn't ever seen a demon, as far as anyone knows. They tend to go for the big centers of magical life, where there are a lot of magical beings living together. There's not enough magical institutions in most of Africa for them to ever have a reason to try to invade."

"You can suggest it at the MLFC meeting." Rahkesh said. "There's a group in Europe trying to take down Voldemort anyway so they'd probably agree with you. Alastor Moody is leading it and he's an alumnus, he'll be at the Conclave."

"Grandmother's working on an assessment of weak points to add to the discussions." Daray explained.

"What about the prisoners?" Rahkesh asked, he'd been waiting for news on that side and hadn't heard anything. He wasn't particularly surprised at being cut out of the loop, since the Ateres were holding onto the demons, aside from the few Namach had. They'd keep all interrogations in the family for now. The demons were unlikely to speak English and so translations would add an extra level and be time consuming. In addition there were no known truth potions that worked on demons. They would have to interrogate each separately and then cross check everything.

"Stupid things are still unconscious."

"It's been days."

"At least they're not comatose. They look awfully weak but they're alive and all major organs are still functioning. Silas thinks they'll be awake by tomorrow. Sharahak is helping with the interrogation, and I'll be there in demon form, for the psychological effect."

Someone knocked twice on the door, Rahkesh drew his wand and waited, another knock came and he and Daray relaxed. At Akren everyone had codes. Rahkesh pulled the ward away from the door with a yellow and silver spell. The door swung open and Ally came in.

"So. Demons in Mexico." She said, taking the armchair. "You boys need to tell me next time you're going someplace like that. Sounds like I missed quite a party."

"Only you Ally" Daray said, shaking his head, "would call that a party."

The most amazing part, Rahkesh thought, was that Ally _would_ actually consider that a party. As far as she was concerned a party entailed fighting, blood, death, and various maiming injuries. Whatever line of work Ally was headed for (she wouldn't say, which made Rahkesh think espionage or assassinations) classic music-and-dance parties were the farthest thing from it.

"Is your brother involved in the MLFC meeting?" Rahkesh asked.

"No, he's too junior for that. He's with the home guard during the Conclave. You know the rules of an actual MLFC gathering right?"

"No." Rahkesh had never heard of it until Namach mentioned it.

"I'm not surprised. Britain only joined after being seriously bullied into it after the First World War; they weren't in much shape to protest. So of course they don't teach anyone about it." Daray said.

"Because it pertains to all magical life forms everyone has a voice, hence the representatives of each species. In addition every member of every species involved has a right to be able to watch and/or listen to the entire Conclave." Ally said.

"That's a big deal." Rahkesh stated, needlessly.

"Yeah, just a bit." Ally said. "We'll have every wizarding radio station broadcasting it. And Skyeyes recording everything, which needs to be sent out to several billion displays around the world."

"Skyeyes?"

"Magical movie cameras." Ally explained. "Though they're entirely magical. They're remote controlled and will record everything. Because it's impractical to broadcast to each individual home large centers are being set up. My brother is working security around those. Some people are bound to disagree with anything being said. Some people just like to protest government in any form."

"How do species like the Merepeople and Centaurs get that?"

"Something not unlike a drive-in movie theater." Ally said. "You're going to the Conclave aren't you?"

"Yes. I've been ordered to give a report on demons." Rahkesh said. He'd received the newest deadline that morning. He had one week to write it. "It won't be one of the big events. I'll present to a small committee, probably military planners and academics, and once the questions are over they'll hand out the paper copy, plus the questions and answers, to everyone else. It'll all be a public record."

"You've had more interaction with demons than any other mortal has, anyone living anyway." Ally observed.

"I'm required to be there for the entire session, or at least they have to be able to contact me." Rahkesh said. "The headmistress threw a fit at the idea of allowing maneuverable communications devices in the school. Too much magical connection. The communications mirror I'll be using is one she enchanted herself, to avoid having to let anyone else do it. And if anyone touches it but me it self destructs."

"You really have to love Nvara." Ally said admiringly. "Whoever chose her for Headmistress was a genius. Did you hear she's finished her next animagus?"

"Daray I am going to assume the Ateres are somehow involved in the Conclave." Rahkesh said.

"The Ateres have been hired to secure the buildings during the Conclave." Daray agreed. "More from demons than anyone else. There're still at least five, in this world, unaccounted for. All of them are ones that Voldemort summoned. Never mind the sea demons. The merepeople offered to check that out, they'll have some sort of preliminary report soon."

"What about the sirens?"

"No on has been able to contact them." Daray said with some concern. "They've vanished. Completely. It's as if they all dug a hole, climbed in, and pulled it in after them. Even the people responsible for contact every species with news of the gathering haven't been able to get word to the sirens."

"Sea demons?" Ally asked.

"Maybe. No one knows." Daray said with a shrug.

"What about Sharahak?" Ally asked.

"He'll present, but when he left the demon realm he jumped into the portal after knocking out the lights. No one saw him leave. They probably don't know he's gone. He lived alone after all. Just in case everything goes wrong and we lose and he winds up back there, he's keeping his identity a secret. That way he has some chance of stepping back into his old life there, if the worst happens." Rahkesh said. "He'll be disguised as a normal vampire, calling himself an escaped slave."

"Have any slaves ever escaped?" Ally asked.

"Good question. No one knows." Daray said. "I believe Namach sent word to all the older vampires, just in case someone's heard something. He got a response from the dragon researcher Mariah, but I don't know what."

"That was something different." Silas said, finally arriving. "She's got some documents about the body of a dead dragon being abducted to the demon realm a while back. They probably think it a delicacy or something. It was one of hers - I think she wants it back."

"Had a nice evening?" Daray asked, leering. Silas ignored him. Nuri, however, pounced onto Daray. Placing a paw over his face the panther leaned up to sniff at Daray's hair.

"Can you please get him house trained?" Daray asked from under Nuri's giant paws. "He's not a kitten anymore!"

"He's too cute. Stop whining." Ally said, Nuri, sensing someone he could charm into petting him, leaped off Daray and began rubbing against Ally's knees.

XX

"If they're doing a round up it shouldn't be hard to get one away." Shacklebolt said. Rahkesh had his various mirrors and other communication devices up around him. He needed a dementor in order to destroy the next horcrux, and had decided to consult some of his older allies for ideas.

The vampires and fae local to the UK had joined forces to round up and contain the roving swarms of dementors, freed from Azkaban, that were everywhere. Hundreds of muggles had needed to be obliviated in the last month, and there wasn't enough of a Ministry left to do anything. Instead locals were doing it themselves, often with awful results. Since the vampires had scaled back their plans to reveal themselves to the muggles, possibly indefinitely, they had agreed to help.

With the coming demon invasion the ancients (there were only a handful of real ancients) had unanimously agreed that now was _not _the time to go showing the muggles that vampires and magic in general, existed. It did not make sense to start that project now, not when the demons would probably be invading soon. Having the muggles discover magic, and then have them find out that their magical children were prey for an invading army, would not be good for world stability. Especially since everyone was fairly sure that muggle weapons didn't do much good against demons. It had already been established that electrical devices didn't survive the transport to the demon realm, though there was a Russian team of aurors testing devices built with basic rocket components, thinking they could launch them through portals. There had been some protest from the younger vampires, who had been, in the manner of young beings of any species, looking forward to all the fuss they were about to generate. They had even threatened to go ahead with the announcement without approval. _That_ had been quickly subdued when Cyala, in a rare show of real fury, had forced the spontaneous combustion for six protesters.

So, with the announcement delayed, something had to be done about the wild dementors before the muggles figured it out on their own. Hence a roundup, run by local fae and vampires, but with assistance from several hundred American aurors who were using this as a training opportunity.

"I was thinking of luring one away. One feeding dementor attracts others." Rahkesh said.

"What?" Moody asked.

"My bogart is a dementor. I ran it past one of the professors here and he says it will give off the same signals as a real one would." Rahkesh explained. "Why go chasing after a dementor, especially since they're so hard to catch, when I can get one to come to me?"

"You're going to need someone for it to feed on." Tonks pointed out.

"Moody do you still have Narcissa Malfoy?"

"Yeah. I was thinking of letting her go soon, seeing as I've got no use for her."

"Can you get her to my house?" Rahkesh asked. Referring to the one of the various Potter properties that was a house, as the others were mostly cottages.

"Sure. When?"

"Tomorrow?"

"I can do that. How is this going to work anyway?"

"Well I need to open the locket to get the soul out. So I get the dementor attached to the locket. For that I'll need to trick it into thinking it can drink the soul out of the locket. For that I'll use a bogart to get another dementor to come in, it will see one feeding off the object and will do the same. Once it's attached I throw the bogart away, the real dementor is stuck and it will be drinking Voldemort's connection to the locket itself. That's soul magic so the dementor probably won't protest too much. The blood connection is from one of his ancestors, Slytherin. With that connection gone I can open the locket by removing my connection to Voldemort and tossing it through a vortex. That I'll create with the vampire, the vortex will draw everything into the dead realm. My link going through will jerk open the locket and Voldemort's soul will flow through. The dementor will be destroyed, and the vampire dead."

"Uh huh. That was so far over my head…" Tonks muttered to Remus, they were watching through the same mirror, meaning she had moved to Spain with him. Rahkesh had wanted to ask how things were between them, but hadn't found the right time. He'd have to get Remus alone sometime. But Remus was so busy now with the Spanish werewolf packs it would be difficult to arrange.

"It'll be more straightforward then it sounds." Rahkesh said.

"I should hope so. Would it be dangerous to stay?" Moody asked.

"I imagine not. But you'll have some company. Tristan Namach and few others." Rahkesh warned.

"That's fine." Moody agreed. "I had expected that, they probably think this is all great fun."

"Yes." Rahkesh said with grin. "Our whole work destroying Voldemort is a great opportunity for observational research. Will you be at the Conclave?" He asked, changing the topic so no one could ask about the final horcrux. Moody, remembering how Rahkesh had reacted to finding out where the final horcrux was, allowed the distraction.

"Yes. I'm a well respected veteran and I have fought them, when they attacked Daniel at my place this summer." Moody said. "I imagine you'll be center stage for most of this?"

"I hope not."

"You've seen them more, and fought them more than anyone else."

"I'm writing a report on it. They'll probably want to hear it out loud of course. And I am hoping to be involved in any decision making. But I don't really have any authority of my own there. At best they might listen to my advice."

"Oh I think you'll find this will be a different crowd than anyone you're used to. The only government you've ever encountered was our archaic medieval one. This is much different. The majority of the representatives are Akren trained. And all of them know when they're in a tough spot, and they can pick up pretty fast on who to listen to. Even the non-Akren ones have sharp wits, this is one of the few international bodies that actually functions, mostly. The ICW works pretty well, especially since they got rid of all the old traditions now that Europe doesn't have anyone left to represent. But even the ICW has bureaucracy attached. The MLFC is new, never happened before, so everything is being started from scratch and it's very streamlined. Very modern."

The fae representatives can usually work out a plan of action pretty fast. As long as the vampires and werewolves don't start a fist fight in the main forum this should be straightforward. You won't have much trouble. You really are the only expert on this. Not expert by actual knowledge but by virtue of experience. On your experience alone you'll easily be the person they'll be most likely to listen to. Especially the mortals. We tend to get crowded out, especially with the abysmal behavior of several of our nations in the last few years. Last few decades really. Now that we've got the person who has had the most contact with demons they'll want to bring you out as much as possible."

"I wouldn't go that far Moody. Daray Ateres has had as much contact with demons as I have. And Tristan Namach almost as much, probably more. When we were in Mexico he invaded the mind of one of their sorcerers and removed all her memories."

"You really were there then?" Remus asked, concerned. Tonks, Regulus, and Shacklebolt wore similar expressions.

"Yes. I was."

"Awfully dangerous." Remus said carefully. Rahkesh's relationship with all of his old friends and mentors had a line drawn through it; he didn't want to hear any criticism of his going into dangerous situations. They happened, if he died then he died, and no one was going to get far commenting on how often his life was at risk.

"It wasn't so bad. It could have been much worse." Rahkesh replied gently. "This is what I'm training for Remus, someone has to do it. I won't say I enjoyed it, but better to know what's going on then be caught unawares."

"I know. Just don't go getting yourself killed pup." Remus told him. Rahkesh smiled a little.

"I like being alive. I called my old friend Sharahak, the vampire who got turned into a demon, I told you about that right?" They all nodded, the full story had only be a recent revelation, one that had sparked an all night conference between Moody, Remus and Shacklebolt on just what their younger friend was turning into. "I called him back to this world. He lived in that realm for nearly a thousand years. I think he'll be the star of the show. He knows everything. Though he lived as a recluse and stayed away from all the others he still went to great effort to memorize stuff to use when he came back here. He always thought he'd get back you see. He may not know a whole lot about their training and stuff, because he stayed out of that, but he knows their society in and out."

"I'd like to meet him, sounds like a tough fellow. How old is he?" Moody asked.

"I don't know for sure. I think he's about fifteen hundred, maybe a century or two more. That qualifies as an ancient doesn't it?"

"Yes it does but he's not a vampire anymore is he?"

"No. But he and Namach have really hit it off, and he and Cyala's brood get along very well. I think he'll stick with the vampires for the most part." Rahkesh guessed. Sharahak and Namach had gone to retrieve some of Sharahak's things, locked away in a cave in modern day Iran. Like all traveling vampires he'd always kept a stash as insurance, since he didn't really have a secure home territory. Those two got along very well, even if Sharahak was overly subservient, to the point of actually irritating the older vampire. Sharahak's continual obsequiousness around the other ancient was more than a little odd behavior for a wanderer who was skilled enough and old enough to command respect on his own. Rahkesh couldn't quite figure it out, but for whatever reason Sharahak was in considerable awe of Namach, and showed it constantly. Namach tolerated him, barely managing to hide his concern and annoyance.

"What do you think the Conclave will do?" Tonks asked.

"I have no idea. If I get the chance I'm going to recommend the formation of a half dozen mobile teams of fighters, ready to deploy anywhere a portal is found, to contain and destroy it. Then have every nation start building an army of magical fighters." Rahkesh said.

"If these teams do get formed, I think I'd like to join." Tonks said softly. Remus looked alarmed, almost said something, then went silent, looking troubled.

"As would I." Shacklebolt said.

"Suppose I'm too old. But I think I'll volunteer to train whatever fighting force develops." Moody mused. "Much as I enjoy my retirement this is more important. I imagine the primary teams will be composed of AAA fighters."

"Probably." Rahkesh agreed. "But given that there are plenty of places where there isn't enough of a magical community, or government, to create a defense force the Conclave may decide to join forces, commanded on a species-by-species basis by a central command not affiliated with any nation."

"Now that sounds like and idea." Moody agreed. "And I bet they'll ask you for suggestions, just because you've seen these creatures in action so often."

"Back to the horcrux" Rahkesh said, getting back on topic, "if you can get Narcissa to the house around noon we can destroy it tomorrow."

"What about your classes?" Predictably it was Remus who asked this question.

"I've got an exam in the morning, four basic healing spells. Then a class on designing Black Necromancing summonings, but after lunch I'm free until seven when I have mind magic."

"Excellent." The sooner we can get rid of snakey the better." Regulus said. Rahkesh nodded his agreement, knowing that Regulus was anxious to get back to Australia; he'd been away far too long already. Sirius's brother was staying around out of a sense of failure for running away during the first war, and while he was determined to see this one out to the end he had been gone from his friends and family for too long.

XX

More than a month in a cell and Narcissa Malfoy still managed to look beautiful and suitably aristocratic. Rahkesh thought as he watched Alasor Moody and his prisoner walk up the lawn. Dark purple robes with silver brocade and neatly combed, if plain, hair. She held her head high and ignored everyone around her, and especially Moody by her side. There no restraints in her, but without a wand she couldn't do anything anyway. Most magical people replied on magic for all self defense. Narcissa was too far into the pureblood rhetoric to have learned anything so plebian as hand to hand combat.

This was the fourth of the five Potter properties. The fifth was at Godric's Hollow, Rahkesh had never visited and didn't really want to do so. This one was a house with a small lawn and thick woods stretching back. The nearest neighbor was half a kilometer away. Far enough that wards could be placed through the woods to prevent nay sign of what was happening escaping.

For the new wards, to keep the magic he would be using contained, Rahkesh had had a lot of help. Shaklebolt, Remus, Tonks, and Minerva McGonagal had arrived early. Rahkesh had been shocked to see Hogwarts new Headmistress there. McGonagal looked exactly as he had remembered. War, anarchy and plague were swirling like an angry storm everywhere but she seemed immune to it all. They had greeted each other warmly enough, no longer student and teacher. But he hadn't had time to say more than a few words before others started arriving.

Professors Xanthius and Namach had come shortly after Rahkesh. Lord Hadrian had sent Andrew Farov and five other vampires to keep an eye on things. The dementor roundup was well underway and the fae had agreed to take a report later from a recorder. It was floating about their heads now, a bright blue sphere of magic with a tiny revolving set of pearls inside.

Rahkesh was a nervous wreck. He'd warned all of his old friends against saying anything that might give any hint to his past identity. All of them had adequate mental wards. But he couldn't help the cold sweat that came over him every time he remembered that the vampires who knew him as Rahkesh and the humans who knew him as Harry Potter were in the same space. It was unlikely that any of Hadrian's vampires would figure it out, but he dreaded it enough that he hadn't slept a wink the night before. Sure everyone knew Moody was an Akren alumnus, but the others, particularly Remus, were far too easy to tie to Harry Potter. Rahkesh had almost asked Remus not to come, but had decided that it would be far too rude to the werewolf. Remus was one of the old crowd - a long time member of the Order of the Phoenix. They could be discrete and keep a secret; they had to be able to do that just to survive.

But none of that calmed him any. He was fast reaching the conclusion that the only way to avoid having his old identity mix with his present would be to publicly kill Harry Potter. Harry Potter was a useful tool, but only around his home. Still Rahkesh wanted none of it. His book on Parseltongue had appeared on shelves all over Europe the day before. It had been announced in every major paper. Harry Potter and Rahkesh Asmodaeus were listed as co authors, along with the three vampires who had helped. For that alone his new name was going to be well known soon enough. But separate from Harry Potter. It was time to shed the Potter identity before someone other than a close friend or ally figured it out. His fear of being discovered was already just about a certifiable paranoia, and getting worse as events conspired to push his old life and his new closer together. The freedom he'd won with his new self was something he couldn't bear to give up. To have everyone know where he came from, who he had been. He couldn't leave Akren, couldn't disappear again until after he graduated. Some how he _had_ to keep Harry Potter away from him for that long.

Had Rahkesh been thinking clearly he might have found it amusing that he was getting so frantic over anything other than the risky ritual he was about to attempt. But for Rahkesh the fear of discovery was far more terrifying than being torn to pieces if he messed up the ritual. The way he got cold and choked with panic every time he saw a person from his old life and a person from his new one occupying the same lawn was frightening in and of itself. Fear intense enough to make him stop functioning made him even more afraid. If anyone ever found out he'd have to leave as soon as possible. And he didn't want to keep on running forever. He'd run as far as possible, and hid as best he could, given who he was, but it seemed like the specter of his past was always floating beside him, not nearly far enough away.

He'd gotten so nervous over it that Remus, worried that Rahkesh would have some sort of nervous breakdown and accidentally kill himself and possibly everyone else, had dragged Shacklebolt and Tonks off to the house. There they could watch from the massive living room windows. The windows had been enchanted to be one way.

Rahkesh had calmed somewhat after that. Enough that Namach and Xanthius stopped giving him funny looks as he paced up and down the drive. Rahkesh hadn't been paying much attention to his scent and, unknown to him, he reeked of pure terror. He'd even been so distracted by his near-panic that he hadn't noticed that both professors had sent up invisible and unnoticeable spells to hide the waves of agitation and fear he was giving off from Hadrian's vampires.

"Any idea what is going on with him?" Xanthius asked in the language of his people. The vampire beside him replied in the same, fluently.

"After this horcrux there's only one more."

"The one he carries."

"The one that he doesn't know you know about." Tristan reminded him sharply. Xanthius almost snorted, almost, to actually do so would be too undignified. The elf had been aware of that horcrux since he'd met Rahkesh in the bloodmagic chambers the day Saul Folvern had died. He hadn't known whose horcrux it was, but he had sensed that Rahkesh carried one and had insisted on answers from his colleague immediately afterward.

Tristan, naturally, had done a passable impression of a clam. Eventually Xanthius had figured it out on his own. And after Rahkesh's little mind-fight with Ferraidar both Ferraidar and Ryavar had sensed what Xanthius had. Unknown to Rahkesh the elves were following Voldemort very closely and had taken a keen interest in what was happening in Britain.

"Whatever. Is he so frightened of removing it?"

"Maybe."

"No."

"What?"

"When you say "maybe" like that, it means no. You know what he's so terrified of, and you just don't want to tell me."

"Who told you that?" Tristan asked, annoyed that Xanthius could read him so well.

"Ferraidar." Xanthius replied with a half-smirk. Tristan gave no outward sign of annoyance, but the elf sensed a bolt of magic flying from the vampire into the elf realm, probably aimed at Ferriadar's ears. "Ryavar wanted to be here you know. She finds the way you hominids play around with your own souls to be very fascinating." Xanthius said. Tristan remained silent and Xanthius realized that this was probably not welcome news to the ancient vampire.

"So?" Xanthius finally tried again.

"You know who the mortals here are?"

"I know their names. They are the representatives of the Order of the Phoenix. They are a tenacious bunch. You don't often see mortals so dedicated. They really want this Voldemort fellow gone."

"Your view of mortals is far too shallow."

"Don't try to divert me. Why would he be afraid of them?"

"He's not. Standing behind us are several vampires belonging to Lord Hadrian. Now the chances of any of them piecing together Rahkesh's identity are miniscule, but the fact that there _is_ a chance at all is what's bothering Rahkesh."

"Oh come now Tristan! Surely you don't expect me to believe that. That young mortal is just about stupefied with fear and you're telling me it's because he's scared some bored flunky of Hadrian's is going to have the brains to figure out who he really is?"

"Yes. And it isn't without some truth. Hadrian really does rule the vampires of Britain. Rahkesh is from here. With all the interest in Rahkesh lately Hadrian is currently picking over every grain of sand in the country trying to find what rock Rahkesh crawled out from under. He has no past before his appearance at Akren, but he's far too fine a creature to have never done magic before. He's Akren's new star, and he appeared out of thin air from the least likely country in the world. Even if he kept it secret for nearly a year most everyone knows what country he's from now. We've had former nuns manage Akren, but someone from Birtain? It's been so long _I_ don't remember the last one."

Xanthius pondered this for a few minutes, watching Rahkesh, who was watching the approaching forms of Alastor Moody and Narcissa Malfoy with obvious relief. His smell had stabilized and was the perfect placid calm that any Akren student quickly learned to present. Until today Rahkesh had seemed virtually unshakable. Even the arrival of two death dragons at the destruction of the last horcrux had barely made him blink. But at even the slightest possibility of his former identity becoming known Rahkesh had unraveled completely. Xanthius knew well enough Rahkesh's suicidal fear of having anyone read his mind, he had seen Rahkesh utilize his fear as a weapon and give the entire fae council a headache. He'd watched a telepathic replay of that exchange and had been both shocked by Rahkesh's terror and his willingness to die rather than give in, and impressed with his control. But even with that until now he hadn't been able to find any weakness in the young mortal.

"I suppose his fear of discovery is partly the cause of his fear of having anyone read his mind."

"Probably."

"You know more than you're saying." Xanthius stated. Tristan didn't reply. He didn't need to. "Would it really be so bad if everyone knew who he was? I fail to see just how that would be cause for such a reaction. He's already more famous as Rahkesh than he ever was before. Now the whole damn world knows his name and face and abilities. He's center stage in the biggest upheaval in human history. Who cares about his first life?"

"He does." Tristan pointed out. "He's so terrified of it I'm starting to wonder if he would pull another disappearing act, and damn the Akren rules."

"He couldn't do that and he knows it."

"He thinks he can't, however he could escape. Of all our students he could actually do it. The dragon's blood isn't finished with him yet; it's just getting ready for act two. We could never trace him fast enough before it changed him again."

"Perhaps it is time someone took a look at his past. There has to be a reason for such fear." Xanthius said carefully, knowing Tristan probably knew everything there was to know about Rahkesh.

"I have not. If that's what you're asking." Tristan surprised him. An Akren student with a problem as serious as Rahkesh's was usually given a good deal of counseling from the professors. Weaknesses were unacceptable. And while the school left everything alone, including the numerous and often hideous crimes committed on its grounds, they were also a school and were supposed to be teaching and guiding. And if that alone wasn't enough to get the Professors involved Tristan was very fond of the young mortal, to the point of actually involving himself in the squabbling of the older vampires who wanted Rahkesh turned into one of them. Since Tristan almost never got directly involved, the way he had left Sergio a bloody comatose mess after that vampire had refused to let Rahkesh alone said a lot of how much he cared for Akren's thunderbird.

"I was of the impression that you were going to try to convince him to become your next apprentice; shouldn't this be of great concern?" Tristan remained silent. "You _don't_ think his mental functioning is at all impaired by this?" Xanthius asked incredulously. Tristan rotated and fixed his eyes on the elf professor's. Xanthius froze as the air suddenly started getting cold.

"No Xanthius, I don't think it is." Tristan stepped closer until they were almost nose to nose, staring into Xanthius's eyes, his own burning bright gold. "And even if it did this is one matter I will not yet pry into. _And neither will you._" The last was delivered in a secondary language, High Elven, a language forbidden when a non-elf was anywhere in their realm. No creature but elves had ever heard it spoken. Tristan's obvious perfect command of it shocked Xanthius to his core, even as the magical command backing the words hit him and nearly made his knees buckle.

Tristan turned back to the mortals in the center of the lawn, the thin illusion that had hidden the entire conversation and confrontation from everyone else dissipated. Beside him Xanthius had stopped breathing and was staring straight ahead, glassy eyed, as he tried to process what had just transpired.

"Let's get this over with." Moody said as he approached Rahkesh. "Are you sure you're ready Thunder?" He asked quietly, eyeing Rahkesh carefully, not hiding his concern.

"Never better." Rahkesh replied with a relaxed grin. He meant it, now that he was about to start he was perfectly calm. All the anxiety and fear vanished in a heartbeat. It occurred to him as he led Narcissa to the center of blood ring on the lawn that doing bloodmagic actually had a calming effect on him. He stunned Narcissa, then petrified her.

"Very well. Be careful." Moody said, Rahkesh gave him a warm smile, knowing it was as close as Moody would ever come to saying he actually cared about him

"The others are in the house. I was uncomfortable with Hadrian's vampires seeing them." Rahkesh explained, retrieving the plain wooden box containing the bogart with a summoning charm.

"We really need to have a chat about your other self one of these days."

"That would be a good idea. I need to brainstorm how to get rid of it permanently." Rahkesh replied lightly. And just like that the decision was made. Moody stared for a long moment.

"Finally gotten tired of watching every move so carefully? I'm surprised you lasted so long. McGonagal and I have a bet on as to how long it would take you to kill him off." Moody said, "him" being Harry Potter.

"You'll have to let me in on the betting pool before I do it."

"Why?"

"So I can pick a winner." Rahkesh replied with a devilish grin. Moody cackled in his gruff way and waved as he limped over to greet Namach and Xanthius.

Feeling light headed and just a bit giddy Rahkesh summoned the vampire into the center of a second blood circle. The runes were already spread out across the lawn in celtic-looking knots of blood lines and careful swirls. It was a tripod-a three point design for soul magic. His first real attempt at it. Namach and Xanthius had helped extensively because however fast Rahkesh was getting through his bloodmagic classes he wasn't yet good enough for this stuff and wouldn't start studying it for a while.

Because he would need to remove the bogart and create a vortex in just a few seconds he had everything ready beforehand. He had stunned and petrified Narcissa so that she didn't mess up anything and now he locked her in place in the center of her blood ring. Next he summoned a plain wooden box containing the bogart. Then he waited. In a few minutes the fae's recording sphere turned gold, indicating that there were dementors close enough to sense him. The fae, vampires, and aurors had orders to allow one to escape. Though they had no idea why.

Setup complete Rahkesh activated the warding magic. Sapphire blue magic flew from the blood runs and closed over him, covering him. While this would protect him from distractions and any possible interference it also meant that no one outside could see in, which was frustrating for them.

Next came the vortex. From the time he completed the runes he had slightly less than five minutes until the vortex occurred. Drawing a knife Rahkesh levitated it to the petrified vampire. He cut both wrists and conjured a simple bucket for the blood. This he then levitated around inside the blood ring. Creating a miniature three-point design that from above would like a lot like a three-pronged throwing star with slightly curved blades. Next he worked long ribbon trails of blood onto the ground within each of the three sections. Finally he banished the bucket of blood and found the knife again. He moved the vampire so that his forehead was directly over the point where all three sections converged. Then he began to cut the runes. One set to tie to his head, another to his chest, the third to his navel. Slowly life and magic began to flow from the vampire into the channels of blood. Because it was all connected it became a continuous loop feeding back into itself. Perfectly stable, though very strained. Rahkesh and deliberately created sharp zigzags in the runes, where the blood and magic had to change direction too quickly. He had also misplaced the navel cuts so that they were not the perfect symmetry, and he had left out the ties to the feet entirely. Because the feet were so far from everything else they needed their own runes, all soul magic left runes on the feet. The ritual was working, but it was botched.

Rahkesh cleaned the knife and slipped it back into its sheath on his left leg. He first made sure the shield was fully in place and closed. Then he flicked his wand and opened the box.

And saw himself step out.

Himself as he was in his Harry Potter disguise. Shocked Rahkesh froze, staring, transfixed at the sight. His bogarts had never deviated before. What was this? The other just stared. Then it smirked. Rahkesh's hand trembled and he almost dropped his wand. Backing up a step he stopped just inside the blood ring. He couldn't break that. Drawing a deep breath he moved forward, a glance at Narcissa confirmed that the stunning spells were still working; she could see and hear nothing. Rahkesh closed his eyes and focused, bringing to mind the horrors of the dementors, the memories they could bring.

When he opened them he was faced with a dementor. Rahkesh had time to breathe once, then he dove for the ground and hurled Narcissa forward as the dementor bogart swooped at him.

It caught Naricssa in mid air and paused. It was looking for her worst fear. But it would find only the immediate – Narcissa had drunken a mind-clearing potion. She would not regain a single fear or memory for days. Only what she saw right now. And right now she saw a dementor, and so that was the immediate fear. Reacting like a true dementor the bogart leaned down and began to drink.

Rahkesh stayed on the ground, waiting. He could feel them now, dementors coming. But it was more than one. Many more. Rahkesh ignored the approaching dementors, trusting those beyond the blue shield to allow only one in.

Unknown to Rahkesh the fae, vampires, and aurors rounding up the dementors had been attacked by Voldemort's death eaters. The dementors were his allies and what remained of them after the disaster at Hadrian's manor had to be protected. He had won many allies by promising safety from them, to lose them now would be a crushing blow. The aurors had immediately switched to fighting their new attackers while the vampires and fae continued to drive the dementors. But in the confusion some had gotten away.

Also sensing the dementors Hadrian's team of vampires had each conjured a patronus. However, as it turned out they needn't have bothered. As the dementors became visible on the edge of the wood Namach summoned one of them, jerking it away from the rest. He then created his own patronus. A massive corporeal ice dragon that spread its wings over the entire estate and blocked out the handful of dementors on the perimeter.

The single dementor flew through the blue shield spell. Rahkesh ducked again and tried to dampen his magical presence. The dementor went right past him. Rahkesh stood and threw the locket at it. The dementor turned and stopped, the locket froze in mid air in front of the dementor's face. Rahkesh counted slowly to ten, enough time for the dementor to make connection with the soul magic on the locket. Then he went around until the bogart had the box to its back. He needed to get rid of it.

"Riddikulus!" Rahkesh said softly. The bogart turned pink and Rahkesh banished it back into the box while it was too distracted to dodge. The box snapped shut, Rahkesh cast a locking spell. Next he had to remove Narcissa. In her case Rahkesh used a simple banishing spell as well. Tossing her right out of the blue shield, trusting the others to catch her. The box with the bogart in it followed soon after. Rahkesh turned to the vampire and waited, the entire thing had taken barely four and a half minutes. The locket's meager bit of soul magic, on the outside, wouldn't keep a dementor occupied for long.

From the vampire's bloody body a dim glow began, then the blood runes on the ground turned black. Next they began to flame with a black and red fire. The cuts turned black and began to rot. The fire in the runes roared, wrapping around the body in the three-sided figure. Slowly the vampire's skin began to peel back, then the cuts on the navel destabilized.

Rahkesh jumped back as far as possible as the vampire imploded. The entire body jerking then erupting in flames. The fire shot outwards, flinging flaming blood everywhere, then shrank back as though sucked in. A hole appeared in the air where the vampire's stomach had been. It grew steadily outward in a three-armed pinwheel, spinning fast, wreathed in flames. Shredding flesh was flung away then dragged back in, vanishing into the center.

Rahkesh closed his eyes and felt around mentally for his connection to Voldemort. As he searched it it surged to life as though it knew he was looking for it. Pain burned through him and Rahkesh clenched his jaws against the pain. It felt like he had a brand in his head. Slowly the pain radiated outward until his entire body hurt, as though he were under the cruciatus curse.

Rahkesh found the link and drew it out, willing it to manifest solidly. Black magic sparkled as his eyes opened and faint thread grew out from his forehead. Carefully Rahkesh reached out, and activated his blood magic. His hands glowed gold and he felt the runes across his body leap to life. As he delicately gripped the thread and squeeze the runes began to glow visibly. Rahkesh pinched hard and the black thread snapped. The energy sank back into him, sending Rahkesh staggering in pain, but the part in his hand remained out and twisted into a solid glob of black magic with a faint white aura. Rahkesh pulled it with both hands into a long ribbon, then he swung one end towards the floating locket and hurled the other end into the vortex.

Immediately he felt the pain, like fire under his skin, like being skinned alive. Rahkesh realized he'd fallen, that he was on the ground with his eyes closed. He opened them just in time to see the black magic and locket connect. Then the locket was ripped open. Rahkesh screamed in pain, his fingernails digging into the ground. His link with Voldemort came fully alive for the first time years, and Voldemort was screaming too as part of his soul was destroyed.

The dementor didn't separate from the locket fast enough, as the soul leaped out of it the dementor followed, the vortex swung outward and one of the pinwheel arms wrapped around the dementor. Rahkesh clamped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes, curling into a fetal position, trying to control the seizure the pain brought on.

The thunderbird screamed across his mind and thunder rumbled. Lightning behind his eyelids lashed at the horcrux he carried, tearing its hold on him and wrapping it back and away into its corner. As though he were watching from the outside Rahkesh saw the lightning rip into the nerves hurting him, pushing the pain back. His eyes opened and he saw the vortex shrinking in, the wind from it was strong enough to tear the grass.

Finally the pain faded and the wind stopped. The vortex was gone, wrapped into itself and closed. Rahkesh slowly stretched out, his bloodmagic felt whole, intact. Well that was one good thing. He staggered upright. Slytherin's locket lay on the ground, charred and blackened. Probably burned flesh and grass covering the silver. Maybe it could be cleaned and put in a museum. He staggered a little and went to where the vampire had lain. The grass was turned to ash and smoking faintly. Rahkesh conjured water. There was no sign of the vortex, vampire, or dementor.

Rahkesh lowered the shield. Hadrian's group waited, with the fae's recorder overhead, while Namach and Xanthius examined the site. Namach concluded immediately that the vortex was gone, and there was no threat. Xanthius looked over the soil and told the fae that they could count the dementor as dead. Rahkesh stood by, exhausted, and watched. Eventually the two finished.

"Clean, perfect execution." Namach said, he picked up the locket. "Nothing left. Probably salvageable."

"The bodies?" One of the watching vampires asked.

"Vaporized. The vortex only took in souls. The bodies are ash or vaporized. Nothing left." Xanthius said. "Perhaps Hadrian should turn the locket in to the Ministry, or whomever is left around there." Namach gave the locket to Andrew Farov. Rahkesh waited while the vampires departed, then he looked up at the blue glowing recorder.

"Got enough?" It blinked out in a flash of yellow, he assumed that meant yes.

"How do you feel?" Namach asked.

"Well enough. Tired." Rahkesh said. "And I still have the last one. He's shaken up some. But I think the link might be open. I'll need to spend some time meditating and closing it."

"Ask Professor Masamba for the candles used in locking magic." Namach said. "They're used when a Mind Mage is trying to lock in changes in his mental defenses that are short-term, usually only used in battle. Breathe in the smoke while you work. You'll feel its effect pretty fast and it should help in closing in the link." Rahkesh nodded. "Go talk to your friends in there. They're worried - I can smell it from here." The vampire and elf left and Rahkesh turned back to the house. One more to go. Maybe two weeks, three, depending upon demons and other things.

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Please review! Reviews feed the muse!


	16. Chapter 16

Sylkie – no, the shield blocked him from view.

Lady of Serpentine – Namach and the elves will get explain…eventually

Evergreen Sceptre – I'll get the bloodmagic thing done very soon.

Respen – that would be amusing, but not dramatic enough.

Y0ndaime – I love knowing someone's been with this fic that long!

happyIbanez423 – I'll try to get more detail on the fae soon.

Eldrad36 – more of the last idea.

Etidorpha – yeah I had fun writing that horror story section.

Banner – I LOVE it when reviewers ask lots of questions, all of which will be answered eventually.

Von – glad you enjoyed it so much!

Shadow-of-Roses – aw thanks (blushes). Thanks again.

**I have a website!** Contains character list and other stuff. **www.mirandaworks. 16**

XX

_The Incredible Truth About Parseltongue_

_Parseltongue – Not a Dark Art!_

_Parseltongue – the Magic of Healing_

Rahkesh flipped the page and found two more headlines, also on parseltongue. Since the release of his book a few days earlier parseltongue had been in the news. What had astonished Rahkesh was that the coverage was worldwide. Even in countries where academies of magical healing taught their students what parseltongue really was, his book was making waves. Partly because it was the first ever actual guide to the almost-forgotten magic, but also because it was the first attempt anyone had ever made to explain what the magic was to non-parseltongues.

Most scholars had only the most basic understanding that people who could speak to snakes could also heal, most of the information in the book was completely new. Of course, he'd had a lot of help from the three vampires involved. Two of whom wished to remain anonymous. Rahkesh hadn't asked why, but the third vampire, Fayina Shiila, had added in a note that the two anonymous coauthors were vampires. Rahkesh and Harry Potter were the only mortals involved. A collaboration between the two species already made it an interesting book to a lot of people. Harry Potter's fame just added to it. Even outside of Europe Harry Potter was known, though not so well. And Rahkesh got a lot of recognition all on his own. However, what really interested him about all the fuss was that the British Ministry (what remained of it) was looking for Rahkesh Asmodaeus. Probably they wanted to ask him about Potter.

The search for Harry Potter might have been pushed aside by the plague, but Voldemort was still at large and gaining support. He'd managed to turn the plague into an advantage by spreading the word that the addition of muggleborns into the Ministry had allowed for such an object as a demon portal to go unnoticed and remain. Had the Ministry remained completely in old pureblood hands they would never have overlooked such a thing because they were raised magical and knew to pay attention to such things. He was also promising safety from the plague, and an orderly government capable of handling the demons and making sure that the magical people remained undiscovered by muggles and secure. His pureblood idealists were gaining ground in what remained of magical Britain. With him gaining supporters the remaining aurors were searching for Harry Potter. The Ministry was now functioning again, with employees working from home and commuting in through special spells designed to keep the airborne plague out. Knowing that having Potter would bring back the public the Ministry was going after him as much as Voldemort was, and they wanted to speak to Rahkesh as a 'person of interest'.

Rahkesh hadn't replied to any of their letters.

He was also making a surprising amount of money from the sales of the book, half of which he and all the other authors sent to an elderly parseltongue living in India who was referenced in the book as a contact agent for young parseltongues seeking guidance and aid. So far no one had turned up, but Rahkesh figured it was only a matter of time. He and his coauthors had recommended to parents that they seek out some sort of guidance for parseltongue children, and help in raising them, from the parseltongue recommended in the book.

Folding the papers and putting them into his bag Rahkesh looked in the mirror to make sure his disguise worked. He was in the men's room of a small bar & grill. He would never dare expose one of his other identities in Akren, especially not Harry Potter, so he'd switched here before going on to the Weasely's place.

He looked like Harry Potter. His hair was shorter and messier, his lightning bolt scar showed, he looked a little shorter, his clothing muggle attire. Simple too, faded old blue jeans, slightly tight black t-shirt and a denim jacket a little too large. He slouched a bit and rubbed a piece of fake skin over one of his obsidian earrings. Fake skin also covered several scars. No weapons visible, though that was far from the truth. He'd even removed one of the Chachapoyaro enchanted necklaces he usually wore. It was a plain chain with feathers and stone magic, but long enough that he could hide the feathers down the back and front of his shirt. It was now in one of his trunks, which were in his earrings, since he had yet to find a better way to carry them.

He had just completed the delivery of half a cubic meter of werewolf fur to Jeris Fleming. The paranoid heliophobe genius had proved a good business contact. Most of the stuff he was into were things that Rahkesh didn't want to even know about, much less get into the business of supplying. Rahkesh still sold rare potions ingredients to Matthew Fleming, but when his brother had mentioned his need for the werewolf fur Matthew had contacted Rahkesh. Rahkesh had taken five days to gather it all. A good portion of it had been from a werewolf in his healing class, who had used their recent testing of healing spells on classmates as an opportunity to try to get Rahkesh's blood. He'd failed miserably and Rahkesh had fought, and defeated him, later that day. Rahkesh had demanded his fur in exchange for his life. That was one werewolf who was going to look very odd the next full moon – he'd shaved off most of his fur and it wouldn't grow back in time.

The rest of the fur had been easier, Rahkesh had switched out a few potions in the first-year werewolves breakfast. He hadn't made the potions themselves – those he'd bought and then mixed. The price of the potions was much less than what he'd gotten for the fur. They'd never know who it was, and he'd used some quick summoning spells to get a lot of loose hair (the werewolves were naturally shedding). They'd been in wolf form all day and it had been easy enough to get all he needed. He'd cleaned it all and packed it into a small box.

Getting it to Jeris had been interesting. Rahkesh had been given directions into a few abandoned tunnels filled with homeless muggles. Down the far end was a welded door. Rahkesh had gone invisible and stepped through the door. Inside was a small tunnel with a conveyor belt running off into inky darkness. Rahkesh simply placed the box on the conveyor belt. The entire apparatus had promptly vanished completely. Rahkesh assumed (correctly, though he didn't know it) that the entire thing was an illusion. Then he'd walked back out the door, stepped into a shadow, become visible again, and walked out. Werewolf fur was not illegal, but Jeris treated all but the most mundane orders as if their existence carried the death penalty. Rahkesh was sure his routine was even more elaborate for things that were actually illegal. He'd gone straight to Jeris's store, only to find the box already delivered in a back room. Because Jeris only paid in cash, and because he didn't want anyone to be able to say he'd cheated them, he allowed all incoming supplies to be locked. Rahkesh had undone the complicated wards on the outer box, and given Jeris the inner one. He took the enchanted box with him, and found his payment on the counter on the way out. Jeris didn't appear the entire time.

The Weasely's place was a small single-family house in what appeared to be a perfectly normal neighborhood. It was anything but, this was home to an eclectic mix of magical beings from four species. Since the Weasely's were from Britain they were heavily monitored by the Ministry, and had been given a choice of neighborhoods, all of which contained magical families of good repute and long stability. Nobody here would ever be a likely conspirator to Voldemort or to any attempt to start up the British 'hate culture' as the papers were calling it. The incoming British refugees were, for the most part, treated very well by their American hosts; the muggle communities of both nations were very close after all. But they were monitored and neighbors were encouraged to immediately report anything suspicious. The Weasely's were apparently on good terms with everybody, which made sense since they really were genuinely nice people. Mr. Weasely was talking to his neighbor by their cars as Harry walked up the block from a bus stop. The houses here were simple and the area clean and apparently safe; kids were playing everywhere.

Harry paused and felt mentally at his scar. The foreign magic seeping around it was unpleasant, but there was nothing from Voldemort. So far his attempt at putting it back in its box after the ritual seemed to have worked. He had felt nothing from Voldemort. Though he himself still ached and had trouble sleeping. He hoped Voldemort would not try anything until Rahkesh was ready to get rid of him. Taking a deep breath he gathered his confidence and walked up the drive with an easy gait that concealed his mounting nerves.

Mr. Weasely waved to him with a broad grin. "Harry! Lad it's good to see you."

"Hello Mr. Weasely." Harry said, and he couldn't help but grin in reply to the man's enthusiasm. Apparently Mr. Weasely was not seriously grieving over Ron and Percy, privately might be another matter.

"Everyone's in back." Mr. Weasely said, jerking his head towards the back yard. Outside there was a large wooden deck set with a large table, delicious smells were coming form in the house and Harry could hear lots of voices. Mr. Weasely led him onto the deck and called out to everyone.

"Harry's here!" Harry looked around. The first thing he noticed was that Remus and Tonks hadn't come, in fact the only older people present were Mr. and Mrs. Weasely plus Charlie Weasely. Everyone else was about his age – Harry Potter's age – not Rahkesh's.

"Harry!" Ginny said, jumping at him for an enthusiastic hug. Harry laughed and hugged her back then leaned over to clap Neville on the shoulder. Luna smiled at him, her arm around Neville's waist. Then Hermione wrapped him in a hug, the others, thankfully, let him alone. Dean was there, along with Sheamus, Susan Bones, Hannah Abbott, Terry Boot, Justin Flinch-Fletchley, Cho Chang, and Ernie Macmillan.

"Woah, flashback, is all of Hogwarts here?" Harry asked, grinning at everyone.

"Just about." Terry Boot replied, "but we didn't invite the Creevy's. I thought it would scare you off."

"Someone give that man an award." Harry said with a grateful nod. They all laughed. Then Harry sensed someone else and turned to find Angelina and Alicia coming out of the house with Fred and George. Wow, they really had gotten everybody. "Hey Angelina, Alicia, congratulations on the making the Haileybury Hammers!" Living in Canada Rahkesh did occasionally read the papers.

"Thanks." Alicia said, grinning. "Oliver's with the Thundelarra Thunderers now."

"Good for him!" Harry said. "Hey Ernie, what're you up to?"

"I'm working in an apothecary right now. It's actually very interesting." Ernie said.

Mrs. Weasely called everyone to dinner. Harry found a place near the end of one table, his back to the fence that ran around half of the patio, everyone else and the doors and staircase were in full view. Yeah, he was definitely paranoid. But better safe than sorry, especially since he was still being hunted by a lot of people. If Voldemort had any idea that there was a mini-reunion going on he'd probably watch in case Harry showed up. But his scar was still. No pain. The group chatted about jobs and the changes in the world over the past year. It wasn't until desert came out that Cho finally got everyone's attention by turning to Harry and asking "so what really happened that day at the Ministry when the demons arrived?"

The table went quiet as everyone turned to listen.

"What makes you think I know?" Harry asked casually. Buying time to think and review the little speech he had prepared.

"It's not hard to work out where you are. We all knew you had gone to a new school last year. And then this thing with Akren…Harry you're always in the middle of stuff like that." Cho told him. Letting him know gently that they were not actually that stupid. Rahkesh looked around at them all, and put his fork down and leaned back, it was time to give them some truth.

"Yes. I am at Akren Academy. And yes, I was there that day at the Ministry. Voldemort tried to make a pact with the demons. We at Akren figured out that there was a portal at the Ministry and sent a warning. They ignored it. We went to try to get it before any summoning could be performed. We didn't get there in time." Harry said, keeping to the official story. As far as he and everyone else involved was concerned their real reason for going to the Ministry had never existed. The Akren cooperation had worked so well that every AAA member had repressed their own memories enough that even a thorough mind scan would not reveal anything other than the official story. Relora's abduction might as well have never happened. "We were able to kill both demons and we sent word out to everyone as fast as possible about the plague."

"How did you all figure out about the plague?" Hermione asked. Harry considered carefully, they would hear the truth soon anyway when he made his public report.

"Last year I accidentally traveled back in time. Several centuries back in time. There I encountered demons and their plague. I recognized the magic in the Ministry." Harry said truthfully. With no details. Sure they were sort-of-friends, but he wasn't even willing to tell the MLFC about the Chachapoyaro. Even Tyler, who he saw more often than any of his old friends, didn't know about them. At some level his protectiveness of that ancient civilization was a little irrational, but Daray and Silas agreed with him.

"Time travel!" Ernie gasped. "When?"

"Sorry, I swore not to tell. I spent a year in that time and I had some very good friends." Harry said, thinking wistfully of Nicodemus and Enireth. "My friends were attacked with this same plague. We killed those demons and by quarantining everyone we managed to stop the plague. A lot of people died, many hundreds." He said, blocking out the deluge of unpleasant memories that came along with that.

"So are they really getting ready to invade?" Ginny asked.

"Yes. I was in that cavern in Mexico. They sent an army through, probably just a test run. After that the elves did something that closed off the demon realm for three months. Then the magic fades and the demons will be invading." Harry said, the short version of everything.

"Why do they want to invade?" Neville asked.

"Their whole society relies of slave labor. They also eat humans but most importantly they keep humans as slaves and turn them into vampires or werewolves to increase their usability. They only want magical humans. We heal better and live longer, and muggles don't handle the transportation to the demon realm well. We can take more abuse and can reproduce for longer. They also want all the fae and current vampires and werewolves. They're leaving the muggles alone so that they can snatch up all new muggleborns once they have all the magical world enslaved. This will all be in the papers by the weekend."

They were all silent for a long time, thinking about that. Harry could sense their dawning horror and fear as they began to understand. He went back to his meal, having had plenty of time to accept that the demons were bent on enslaving everyone he knew. "The demons don't ever release their slaves. The reason they need more is because they've been killing off too many and their breeding centers can't keep up."

"Breeding centers?" Neville asked.

"Sorry, left that out. They breed mortals like we breed horses or dogs, for certain traits, and just to increase numbers. Magical humans are everything to them, pets, slaves, food. Their number one sport is killing mortals. They have whole teams and competitions for who can do it the best. They train humans for circuses as entertainment, or for music and singing, they use our skins for rugs, our blood for ink and paint. Most of their economy revolves around us. Humans work the mines, build, clean, farm, raise and train animals and other slaves, we cook - other magical beings or our own species usually, everything is maintained by slaves and there are highly lucrative training and breeding centers to produce all the slaves they need. A magical human from a highly prized bloodline is worth a great deal there. Same thing goes for vampires, werewolves, and fae, except the vampires and werewolves are even tougher than we are, physically, and can endure more. Once mortals are ending their reproductive years or have produced enough offspring they are turned to one species or the other. Or eaten, or killed for entertainment. Gladiatorial games are big there."

Hermione pushed her plate away and stared at him open horror. "They actually do that? They _eat _humans?"

"Actually that's one of the least disgusting parts of it." Harry replied, "We've got word from a reliable source that they also use humans as sex slaves."

That apparently ended everyone's dinner, as they all put their utensils down and stared at him in disgust. "That's sick." Terry finally said.

"We've been calling them demons for a reason." Harry pointed out. "And yes, they've got sick minds. Anything you can conceive of to kill, mutilate, or degrade they probably do as a spectator sport."

"Why haven't we heard of this before?" Mr. Weasely asked.

"Because they were contained behind the Seven Seals. The demon realm has been basically closed for a long time. At some point all the Seals broke. And we can't repair them or replace them. So now it's either die fighting or be enslaved in their realm, unless we can find some way to get rid of them."

"I think I'd rather die." Ginny said softly. "What are we going to do?"

"That's what the Magical Life Forms Conclave will decide." Harry replied. "Ten representatives per continent for each magical species, fae get twelve per continent."

"Can anyone go?" Hermione asked.

"No. But everyone has a right to watch. You'll hear about the locations for local viewing centers tomorrow or the next day."

"Do you think we can defeat them?" Dean asked. He sounded pretty hopeless; apparently horror had already turned to despair. Harry wondered what percentage of the public would follow that way.

"Yes." Harry replied. He may not like the elves much but if their seers said it was possible then it was. But he wasn't going to mention any of that to his friends. Then he would have to explain how he'd met a bunch of elves and that was giving away too much information. "I don't know how but I think we can."

"But what if we can't?" Cho asked.

"Then we'll all either be dead or enslaved." Harry replied. "Not good options. We're facing an attack on all magical life forms."

"Can demons be killed?" Neville asked.

"Sure. But it's very difficult. Killing curses don't work, nor do muggle guns. Indirect magical attacks – like dropping a brick on their heads – will work, so will knives or swords, but only if you're strong enough to get through their scales. There's a variety of curses that work pretty well, but they'll deflect things like stunners and most bone breaking spells. They've also got some pretty impressive sorcerers of their own."

Harry looked around, noting the real fear on their faces. Well they had reason to be afraid. He at least had some chance of outfighting a demon. The majority of them did not. He'd only given them the briefest over summaries of the horrors they could expect in the demon realm, their imaginations were probably filling in the rest.

"They've got superior numbers and the advantage of being on the offensive with multiple portals we don't know about. They've also got surprise; they've been planning this for thousands of years, ever since they lost the battle at Atlantis. We don't know what agents they have here already. But the portals also make it very difficult to transport adult demons. Almost all the demons we've seen so far were juveniles. We've only had one adult make it through a portal. We've got fighting forces who can match their young fighters. Unless they manage to create a portal to transport adults their best advantage is in sheer numbers and the probable slow speed of our responses."

"Well, I guess we can tell the coach that our loss last week didn't mean much." Alicia finally said, "since we'll all be dead or enslaved by the time the World Cup happens anyway."

There were a few very strained chuckles, but most of them didn't even smile. After a moment Hermione changed the subject.

"So did your book on parseltongue get any more parseltongues to reveal themselves?"

"Not yet." Harry replied, grateful for the change in topic. "I suspect most won't bother until after this thing with the demons is resolved. But a court in Germany is revisiting a murder trial of a parseltongue from a decade ago. His parseltongue ability was used as evidence against him."

"Well that's a start." Ginny said. "Why did your coauthors want to be anonymous?"

"No idea, and I didn't ask. We never met face to face – security thing really. Just corresponded by owl." Harry explained.

"British Ministry is looking for all of your coauthors to harass them about your location." Sheamus said slowly, picking at his food.

"I wish them luck. I have no idea where they are, and they don't know where I am." Harry said, grinning.

"They want you to get rid of Voldemort." Ernie observed.

"I'm doing that on my own time." Harry said. "Maybe a week, possibly two if something comes up." They whole table turned to stare. "I'm sick of worrying about him all the time." Harry said, "I want him dead as soon as possible. And anyway, he's a threat to stability, even if there isn't much left to destabilize in Europe. I'm sure he'll be a problem if we try to put any armed forced in Britain to look for portals. He might even try to use that to gain more political power there. Once he's gone it will be one less thing to think about."

"What about the death eaters?" Terry asked.

"Good question. They might all die when he does. If not…well the demons do want slaves, and the vampires always want fresh blood." Harry said with a ghoulish grin. Rather than being amused they all looked at him askance as if he was out of his mind. Harry ignored it. He had no sympathy left and not enough time or energy to care. "Enough of that depressing stuff, there's nothing to be done at the moment there. With the Akren schedule I hardly ever get out, what have all of you been up to?"

"Auror training." Terry and Ginny both answered at the same time. Harry blinked and smiled.

"Bet you'll kick ass. Where?"

"Here?" Terry asked carefully.

"Hm. I've got a few friends in law enforcement here." Harry explained. "The aurors here seems to get treated much better than those at home, but they've also got a lot more restrictions."

"Well Dean, Sheamus, Justin and I are still working to get muggleborns out of Europe. Though now it's to keep them away from the plague as much as the political problems." Hermione said.

"It's very interesting work. I can't tell you how much I love seeing the looks on the kids faces when they find out they're magical." Sheamus said.

"I am taking some classes in business and working at my father's paper." Luna said. "I'm planning a trip to search for Blonklan Riddlers."

"Sounds complicated, planning all that." Harry said, having no idea what she was talking about.

"It is, it really is." Luna said dreamily.

"Are you enjoying school?" Mrs. Weasely asked Harry, brining the conversation back to him. Harry almost snarled before he remembered that _Harry_ didn't do that.

"Very much." He said with a warm smile.

"You know Harry, there are a lot of stories around about Akren." Ernie said.

"Oh I'm sure there are." Harry said.

"Do students really kill each other?" Ginny asked directly.

"Yes." Harry said, equally direct. "Absolutely anything is legal at Akren."

"Everything." Terry stated.

"Everything." Harry assured him. "The competition is very fierce. I'm sure every story you've heard is true."

They all stared at him. Those must have been some pretty bad stories. But it was true.

"Rape, murder, drug trafficking, slavery…" Hermione began, horrified.

"Yes."

"Harry…how can you stand to live in that place?! With people like that?!" Hermione demanded, her voice getting high and loud and angry. Harry responded with reasoned calmness.

"The weak get killed off pretty quick because they slow down everyone else's learning. In the upper level classes there aren't many left and they're all tough enough so that killing becomes rarer with age and experience." Harry assured her.

"But Harry-" Hermione began.

"What about people who don't fight, like healers?" Neville cut in.

"Oh almost nobody hurts a healer." Harry said. "After all if a healer doesn't know you, and you're hurt, there's some chance they'll help. If they like you they will help, if you've ever harmed them then they won't help. Healers get into it with each other, sabotaging projects for grades and stuff. But others rarely hurt them. And Akren healers can all fight well enough to protect themselves."

"It sounds horrifically _barbaric_." Hermione told him tartly.

"Oh I really disagree." Harry said. "It's learning taken to its most extreme form, you don't fail, you die. Everything is up to the student, nobody takes roll call in class, ever. There are few grades, just benchmarks to pass. It's so rigorous that many die trying to keep up. Only the best graduate. Everyone is focused on self improvement. And because of the controlled violence you have to use what you learn. It's perfect."

"Perfect." Ginny stated disbelievingly.

"Yes. It's very Darwinian. I love it. Oh I've had students try to hurt me, but I won those fights and now they leave me alone."

"I don't understand how anything could be worth living in a place where your fellow students can kill you for fun, or drink your blood, torture you for spell practice." Dean said.

"It is hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it. However fiercely violent, extreme and driven the schooling is the loyalty between students is equally fierce. It's a brotherhood of sorts, everyone has experienced a process that turns them into the very best they could possibly be, everyone has a complete understanding of each other and all the alumni. It isn't as much an education as it is a lifestyle."

"But what happens with bullies in a place like that? They'd be uncontrollable; they could do _whatever _they wanted." Ginny said. Clearly imaging some of the horrors.

"We don't have them. Everyone completely respects everyone else. If you piss off too many people they'll get together and kill you. You can tear someone apart and their friends won't step in, but if you're going after everyone they'll all go after you. We get some arrogant bullies but they never last more than a year. We really do respect each other's abilities. That doesn't mean we won't go an exploit each other, but you learn how to evaluate people in an objective manner, and admit it when you can't out fight them. Sometimes it's better to give in to minimize damage. There are students who make it through Akren without having to kill. If you offend a genius they're going to get back at you eventually, so you shouldn't do that, even if you don't like them. Students only go after those they won't later have to worry about."

"What about teachers?" I've heard what they do to students-" Hermione began in the same tone she used when going after owners of house elves.

"That's a bit different." Harry cut her off. "But they too don't want students who might someday be more dangerous than they are and who don't like them. True they'll whip you if you come to class late – if you're going to be late you don't bother going. It's true that some of them use the students like their personal brothel, but they never really hurt anyone unless they're sure they can kill them. Yes they're ruthless and students frequently collapse from exhaustion, but that's what it takes to get to the top."

They all looked horrified again, apparently he wasn't getting through at all.

"Look," Harry tried again, "a person with a gun is more likely to attack just because they can then a well-trained knife fighter. The discipline involved in training to be that good removes impulsive behavior. It also removes most emotional responses. Self control and personal responsibility become paramount. I have heard teachers apologize for being too harsh. I've seen them tear into a student with bone breaking curses and fire whips. But they don't do it just because they can. There's always a reason."

"It still sounds barbaric." Hermione said.

"This is why we don't bother trying to explain ourselves. Those who want to live in a place like that understand, or they're horribly mistaken, in which case they die. It's a one-way decision. Most of those who take that step know it is the life for them. It's something that you just know instinctively. Only those who've experienced it can understand how amazing such a system is. It isn't for everyone, that's why it's a private school and people have to apply. Less than a hundredth of one percent of the magical human population can handle Akren. But for those who can the lifestyle is a relief. You are completely responsible for your own life, with no safety net. I like that life, we all do. Oh the teachers have a job to help you and give advice, but at the end of the day the decisions are yours and there's no end to the consequences. No law to hide behind, only your ability to understand your place in a community. And if you fail then you fail and are removed. Some people like that." Harry paused, then tried one last time.

"You know all my life I've been alone. At Akren I feel like I've finally found belonging. Not a place, but a people. A people among whom I feel little fear and complete acceptance. It's such a relief to sense the Akren signal everywhere I go, it means the others like me are there. The AAA support system is unrivaled anywhere in the world. By the time we graduate we know we're all alike. Every time I go to an alumni meeting it's like coming home. I don't think it's the life for any of you, but it sure is for me."

XX

Rahkesh finished the last of his report and put it down. He and Daray were working together on their speeches and reports for the MLFC. They were in Rahkesh's rooms as usual. Rahkesh refused to meet in Daray's rooms. They always smelled like blood and sex, Daray had a tendency to wrap himself in scents, though, really, that was just an excuse to avoid the display of whips on one wall and the restraints welded to the bed. Rahkesh really had no interest in his friend's sex life.

"So grandmother has decided that she needs to acquire a parseltongue healer for the family." Daray said blandly.

"If I meet any who want to switch species I'll let you know." Rahkesh replied, equally bland.

"That would be nice." Daray said. "Are the parseltongues thinking to organizing?"

"No." Rahkesh said. "We considered it. And all rejected the idea."

"Snakes _are _independent." Daray said. "Are we ever going to tell everyone about the Chachapoyaro?"

Rahkesh looked up, Daray's mind was going all over the place. His protective instincts flaring. Ever since that letter from Nicodemus, giving him the final say in whether or not the Chachapoyaro descendents rejoined the world, he had felt more and more protective of that people.

"No." He stated. Daray raised an eyebrow. "If they want to reveal themselves they will. Until then we have a responsibility to respect their obvious wishes and remain silent."

"What if they don't exist anymore?" Daray asked. Rahkesh looked away, smiling a little.

"Oh they do." He said softly. Remembering a shared prophetic dream and the certainty in the magic upon that letter. "They're still out there."

Daray waited for a few moments, but Rahkesh said nothing more. "I agree." He finally said. "I don't know why, but I think we'd know if they had died out."

"I am a little worried about some older vampire learning about them while drinking your blood, or Silas's." Rahkesh said. Actually it was a real fear of his.

"Won't happen. There are ways to block that. Cyala worked the magic with us. Those memories are locked away with the ones of our family – our codes and artifacts and properties, that stuff. No one is getting at those memories." Daray said.

"Good." Rahkesh said.

"Hmm…you're not actually wearing _that_ to the Conclave are you?" Daray suddenly asked, pointing at Rahkesh. Rahkesh once again had to pause to follow the sudden switch in topic. Daray was bouncing all over the place tonight.

"What? What's wrong with this?" Rahkesh asked. He was wearing simple black pants and a dark green top. What was wrong with that?

Daray groaned and shook his head, "hopeless" the vampire muttered. Rahkesh frowned. Daray was wearing black shoes, sleek perfectly cut black pants and a black top that had a sharp low cutout at the top, showing off a slice of his well-muscled chest. The top was long, but not quite tunic length and the sleeves were long enough that they covered the backs of his hands, almost too long. It fit him perfectly. Then there were the fingerless black gloves of a slippery looking material. A simple necklace of obsidian links with a large black and flaming red opal hung from his neck. His shoulder-length black hair was back in an elegant silver and black and red opal clasp. There were opals of the same type on the shoes, on the celtic-carved obsidian belt buckle, and tiny ones of the backs of the gloves and black silk thread worked into heavy cletic designs down his sleeves and at the lowest point of the sharply angled neckline. Even to disinterested eyes the vampire looked extremely fine tonight. Okay, so Rahkesh did look a little underdressed next to him, but not _that_ much.

"This will never do." Daray sighed, "don't you Brits know anything about fashion?"

"Of course." Rahkesh snapped. Daray gave him a disbelieving look. Without another word Daray marched over to Rahkesh's wardrobe and dresser. "I am perfectly capable of dressing myself!" Rahkesh exclaimed as Daray went to work, muttering incoherently.

_He's got a point. _Sygra said, slipping off the back of his chair and around his neck.

_I look FINE._

_Could be better. You are trying to impress here. _

_No I'm not. I'd rather they not notice me. _

_Don't be silly. _Sygra chided him _Oh…yes that!_ She added as Daray turned around, Daray caught her enthusiastic nod.

"See. Even your familiar agrees with me." He said. "Keep those pants, switch to the black boots, the ones with the spider-silk and emeralds. And put this on."

Rahkesh caught the thing tossed at him, staring in disbelief as Daray went back to his work. Sygra was laughing at him in his ear. Rahkesh shrugged her off and ignored her indignant hiss as she landed on his chair. Daray had selected light cream colored silk top that had a sharp v neck that went a third of the way down the front and was loose like an old-fashioned poet's shirt. It had green spider-silk threadwork and emeralds at the neck. A set of black leather gloves with a few black feathers pressed into their backs and tiny emeralds over those. Rahkesh had gotten both gloves and shirt for AAA meetings…well really because he'd made the mistake of allowing himself to be tricked into going shopping with Rianae and she'd insisted, and he had never actually worn it. Too fancy, he didn't like showing off that much.

With a huff Rahkesh went to change. He liked dark colors. This would was far too ostentatious. Not good. Once he gave in once his friends would never let up. Until now Rahkesh had pointedly ignored all comments on his clothing. However…it was the only MLFC meeting ever called. Giving in temporarily he switched. Glancing in the mirror he had to admit that he really did look good. Which might not be such a good thing.

"I told you so." Daray smirked.

"Do you have any idea what a muggle would say about this?"

"Probably nothing nice. But if you measure high fashion by their trends you might as well go naked."

"I was thinking casual, my nice old leather jacket."

"That thing has holes and ripped threads hanging everywhere." Daray grimaced.

"It's comfortable." Rahkesh protested. He liked that jacket. He'd even started naming some of those holes in the sleeves. Daray gave him a helplessly despairing look. Rahkesh changed the subject quickly. "Will your demon form make an appearance at the Conclave?" Rahkesh asked.

"No I don't think so." Daray said, letting his switch go. "Unless it is demanded by the Conclave representatives. Then I'll leave and chnage species before returning. If necessary the illusionists can create another copy of me. Or Norovosi and I can work out a golem."

"I was thinking it is going to be very hard on Sharahak." Rahkesh said.

"It probably will be." Daray agreed. "We'll have to keep an eye on him. He's new here and he'll need to stay grounded in the confusion."

"Perhaps getting away from the commotion at night will help." Rahkesh said.

"Nervous?" A voice purred behind him. Rahkesh turned and raised an eyebrow at Tristan Namach, who had suddenly appeared behind him. He must have traveled by shadow, as Rahkesh hadn't sensed his approach, and he usually did. Actually _muggles_ sometimes sensed Namach. The power he gave off made your head spin if you didn't block it. Then again Rahkesh was certain the vampire could perfectly hide himself if he wanted to.

"Me? Nervous? About what?" Rahkesh asked with a false cheer. "Meeting a massive room full of the highest ranked members of every species? Please, why would I be nervous about that? Happens all the time." Namach blinked at the unusual reply.

"Feeling a little faint then?" He asked dryly. Rahkesh sighed and shrugged.

"No. And I am not nervous about meeting them. Just having a mild panic attack that I might switch into speaking parseltongue at random moments."

"Why?"

"Because my snake form is being a pain in the ass. I can't seem to keep it under control. I keep going from parseltongue to English. My vision keeps getting snakeish and then fading back again. I keep hearing scales rustling. It's driving me crazy." He said.

"Ever since that last horcrux." Namach said, Rahkesh nodded, and shivered as he felt the urge to transform race through him. Namach raised an eyebrow at the shudder. "Have you switched to your other form recently?"

"No." Rahkesh admitted, it had been a long time since he'd let the thunderbird loose.

"We have three hours." Namach stated, he turned to Daray, who had been following the conversation. "It has been politely requested that we not mess up the apparition wards. And unfortunately the meeting hall is in Sweden. I will teleport all of us there." Daray nodded, Namach turned to Rahkesh, the door swung open. "Don't worry about the storm; we're having a bit of a drought anyway." He turned and left, long smooth strides taking him quickly from the room. Rahkesh paused, and felt a firm dark power give him a little push to follow. He rolled his eyes at Daray and left, apparently Namach wasn't going to take no for an answer.

"I do not wish to deal with you turning into a basilisk in the middle of the hall." The ancient vampire informed him when Rahkesh caught up to him. He walked around a bend, up a flight of stairs, and to a small lounge that opened out onto a balcony. Completely ignoring the three fae studying in there Namach went out onto the balcony and stepped right off into air. Seconds later a massive glittering Ice Dragon glided away, one beat of the enormous wings sending enough air against the mountain to crack a few windows. Rahkesh took two steps and jumped.

Instantly the thunderbird rose, Rahkesh felt feathers ruffle comfortingly over his body as he hurtled towards the ground. He let it go. Feathers splayed out from his arms, a feathery tail grew and his vision altered. Magic flared in shimmering dazzling waves of lightning across his body. Moments later he angled right and away from the mountainside. A moment later Namach rounded the mountainside and swooped just over his head, then angled up and west. Rahkesh turned to follow, trialing lightning and dark clouds.

The Ice Dragon was not one of the smooth sleek dragon species. It was craggy and covered in ridges and spines. Many long thin horns shot backwards from the face, eye ridges and forehead and huge scales shaped almost like flames covered its neck, tapering back to the spine. They stuck out behind as it moved, and down in between them were smaller scales armoring the neck against attack. Lower down when the neck and chest met larger scales shaped into spines with their flared edges overlapping stuck out, creating a thick barrier of downward facing spikes. Every scale was shining white, silver where it met the body, and gold edged the eyes and wing claws.

Rahkesh, in contrast, was not even corporeal. Enshrouded in a massive storm his form was only visible as a shadowy wraith wrapped in flashing lightning. The dark storm raged around him, spreading and building upon itself, bright flashes flying through it. Thunder rumbled and roared, shaking the air. Crackling lightning leaped around the outer clouds as Rahkesh spread his wings and let the storm roar. Soon the sky in every direction was dark with heavy clouds and Rahkesh was visibly only in the flashes of light where his shadow showed through. As the storm grew so too did his form, becoming larger and winging slowly through the clouds and rumbling. The thunderbird screamed and the whole sky lit up.

Namach raised his wings and closed them, dropping through the upper layer of storm clouds and into the center. Lightning danced and crackled over his ice-white hide harmlessly. Seconds later his wings snapped back out as he came in just over Rahkesh's head. Rahkesh felt the dark magic close around him and listened. A mental command came through. The thunderbird shrieked in angry defiance. The ice dragon's wing slammed into his side and despite not being solid he was sent spinning aside with a cry. The second wing buffeted him across the head, Rahkesh rolled and hissed, shaking his head to clear it. Well fine.

He pulled in his consciousness and began drawing in the storm. Pulling it inside of him into a concentrated mass. Slowly he brought the feel of feathers to his mind and forced his animagus into its corporeal form. The switch finally came in an explosion of lightning and pounding thunder. The storm snapped inward and coated every feather.

Solid now Rahkesh beat his wings and flew up out of the remnants of the atmospheric turmoil. Air buffeted around him. Now fully visible his animagus was an immense bird, gold and black flaring feathers, each filled with a world of raging storms. Bright gold eyes scanned for the dragon and found it gliding in beside him. Rahkesh tilted his head back, and beat his wings hard around him, every movement crackling lightning off his body and unleashing great peals of thunder.

Namach twisted and dropped again, falling he titled sideways and soared between two close mountain peaks. Rahkesh followed, flying through the gap, the sun blinding him briefly as they turned west. A simurg shrieked at them from below, where it lay over a great icy nest. Rahkesh lashed the tops of the mountains with lightning, unleashing massive avalanches. The air froze around Namach's wings and snow began to fall, the avalanches turned to solid ice and froze to the mountainsides.

Namach led him the whole length of the mountains, weaving in between massive peaks and dropping low to fly through ravines, frozen even in summer. Rising slowly higher the two spiraled around the highest set of the Akren peaks, skimming glaciers and high jagged ridges. The air was thinner higher up and even with the aid of magic their wings had to beat hard to stay aloft. As they neared the top of one of the highest peaks Rahkesh spotted a small dark form wrapped around the very top. He dropped lower.

Daray unfurled his huge black wings and breathed out a small puff of flames. Next to him a big red phoenix landed delicately on the very top of the peak. _Nvara _Namach told him mentally. A moment later a third form rose, this one an elegant giant white eagle _Xanthius. _Namach froze the fire in mid air. Daray squawked indignantly and cracked his tail like a whip. Looking laughably small and miniature next to the huge bird and enormous ice dragon he held onto the iced peak as Rahkesh came in and landed nearby. Rahkesh claws sliced deep gouges into the ice as he landed and held on, folding his wings. The phoenix and eagle hunched their shoulders as the wind from his landing buffeted them about. Namach flew up to the top of the peak next to them. This one a tall spiraling tower of ice sticking straight up at the sky. He turned his body to align with it, wrapped his tail around the ice spire, dug his claws in and folded his wings gently.

Rahkesh hunched over, swaying as he felt the thunderbird's endless fury raging through him. An infinite vortex of destructive screaming power flying across his senses. Lightning washed over his body, crackling through every feather. Power surged and thunder pounded to the beat of his heart.

The serpent struck.

Rahkesh let loose a scream of agony as his basilisk side reared up, snake instincts tearing into the thunderbird's magic. The serpent's rage surpassed the thunderbird's. Shocked, dizzy and uncomprehending Rahkesh felt his claws slipping in the ice. The snake hissed and coiled, wrapping around the thunderbird's magic. Venom pulsed and scales rustled. Rahkesh cried out and collapsed off the mountain.

Not feeling the fall Rahkesh wrapped himself in his two animal forms as they battled. But the basilisk's power was soaring in way he had never felt before. Rahkesh jerked, wings stretching and tendons snapping as the snake, heedless of the danger, tried to force a transformation. The thunderbird fought but the snakes power was growing and the coils tightening. Scales rippled and stretched, ribs snapped, separated, and grew anew. Limbs faded from existence and suddenly it was the basilisk falling helplessly through the air.

Claws clamped around the writhing snake's body. Ice formed across the scales, freezing him solid. Rahkesh tried to fight, but between the pain and unexpected transformation nothing happened. Namach glided down to a high plateau and released him. The ice melted quickly and Rahkesh coiled onto himself, shaking and shivering. The snake's eyes rolled sickly and he couldn't see.

His senses grew and he was aware of Nvara in her human form appearing beside him, followed quickly by Xanthius and Namach. Daray, in demon form, kept a safe distance on a rocky outcrop. He ached horribly. Magic, uncontrolled and wild tore at his mind. Basilisk instinct flared, urging him to attack. Rahkesh brutally suppressed the urge. Then he started shivering. Snakes weren't meant to shiver. His skin hurt and he felt sick to his stomach. What was happening to him? Dimly Rahkesh realized that he had to get back to his human form.

The snake fought every move. Every rib that had to vanish was a battle of wills as Rahkesh forced the transformation bit by bit. It was pure agony as he forced his limbs to regrow, with complete muscles and tendons. His awareness of every bit of both bodies was heightened as he strained for his human form. Then the cold hit and he realized he was lying, face down, on the ice covered rocks. He heaved, vomiting everywhere, blood covered him from the forced transformation and lightning rippled across his skin in scale-like patterns. Finally it all faded and he lay still, both beasts silent, for the moment. He could feel tears on his face and he hurt at every joint. He was only partially aware of magic moving him and of the sudden teleportation bringing him back to the school.

His eyes opened, Rahkesh looked around. He didn't know where he was at first. Then he recognized one of Akren's special rooms in the medical ward. Rather than a typical infirmary every patient had their own room if they wished. He was on a bed, a set of magical devices beside the bed glowed and colors shifted.

"Hey." Rahkesh looked over and saw the headmistress, Nvara Aelfly sitting beside him.

"Sorry about that." Rahkesh whispered, his voice hoarse and his throat aching. Nvara just raised an eyebrow.

"Sorry? Oh goodness no. Do you have any idea how fascinating this is?" She grinned at him. Rahkesh rolled his eyes skyward and began to laugh. Every breath hurt. "I specialize in animagi and animal forms. Don't _apologize_ for showing me something I've never seen before."

"What happened?" Rahkesh asked.

"We'll know in a minute." Nvara replied. "We're just waiting for the tests. We took some of your basilisk blood and we're running a comparison to the earlier samples." A few moments later the door opened and Namach and Xanthius came in.

"I think we have the answer to what is wrong with your basilisk form." Xanthius. announced. Rahkesh managed to sit up and raised an eyebrow.

"Basilisks fight for choice territory correct?" Namach asked.

"Yes."

"When?"

"What?"

"What time of year?" Namach clarified. Rahkesh paused and searched his mind.

"It's different for each species…but I don't know any of them." He finally said. "Wait, you mean that my species…?"

"It would seem so. Your species mating season isn't until April. You're form is only barely mature, but it is, so it isn't that. So I would guess that the massive hormonal fluctuation you're going through is something else. If the species mates in April then it makes some sense that they would arrange territories during the fall." Namach said. Rahkesh slumped back onto the bed.

"So my snake form wants to fight and stake out a territory?"

"Probably. And it wants your complete attention while this is happening. You really can't access any of that knowledge?" Xanthius asked.

"No. It's part of what I lost." Rahkesh sighed. "What's actually happening?"

"Extreme levels of wild magic in your blood cells, heightened testosterone, and an overdose of something else that we don't recognize. Some hormone that was only present in low levels before. You took samples of your blood when you were injured in Mexico, we compared everything. Whatever this is it is produced during or just before battle. And it isn't adrenaline, though you're off the charts there too." Namach said, handing him what appeared to be a computer print out. Rahkesh knew they used modern muggle stuff for the blood chemistry, and a magical device for the tests of wild magic, which were then entered separately.

"Huh." He said, looking at the massive spike on the charts. "So this is what has been affecting my bloodmagic. The wild magic was driving me into extra rituals to use up the magic. This is going to happen every year isn't it?"

"Yes." Namach said, for some reason the vampire was grinning in a very smug manor, which was mirrored on Xanthius's face. Rahkesh had an immediate feeling of foreboding.

"Okay I give, what else?"

"Oh nothing. We were just theorizing about what's going to happen to you come April." Namach said, and then roared with laughter when Rahkesh groaned and slumped again, hand over his eyes.

XX

The creamy stone building was immense. More a palace than anything else. The entire lower level had tall creamy marble pillars against it, reaching up nearly ten meters. The roof was domed and glittered with a many faceted gold covering. Several smaller towers and side rooms had their own domes. The first level behind the columns had no windows, the columns were too close together and they went all the way around the building. The upper levels had immense windows and balconies everywhere and several glass-encased hallways and staircases. On the outward-facing section of each column was a line of dark red going all the way up. Across the upper edge where they connected were low arches covered in carvings.

Far above two dark angels were flying over the and between the towers and domes, their black flaming forms easily visible, massive wings brushing just centimeters away from the walls and golden domes. Another dark angle stood beside the massive red doors. Rahkesh identified Elara, Daray's petite super-model beautiful mother. Her red hair was just about flaming and her massive wings were flame with shiny black with red highlights. Fire swirled around them and off her hair, claws rested easily on her hands. She was dressed in black and red with bloodmetal armor everywhere. Bloodmetal armor could take any form, and hers was in swirls and symbols attached to bloodmetal armbands, a necklace, and a sort of crown. Her boots were armored, as were the gloves made of bloodmetal links. In visible display were three guns, two knives, a long sword, and there were throwing stars attached to her hips and the belt that ran around her waist and across her chest and back. The sword was over her shoulder, the guns in shoulder holsters. For all the weaponry and wings and fire she was still quite petite and thin with a full curvy figure. Not particularly threatening, as Rahkesh was sure many an opponent had decided just before her pretty little fangs had ended their existence.

The Master of Moscow was resting idly against one wall near the doors. Apparently he had been waiting for Namach, as he detached himself from the shadows curling around him and moved into step beside the older vampire. Namach did not immediately acknowledge him. Rahkesh fell back a bit at the intense look the Russian vampire gave him; he was _not_ getting into an argument before his presentation. Daray, as the youngest there, held the door for the older vampires. The City Master eyed Rahkesh for a long moment before showing his fangs in a quick grin, then said something in Russian to Namach. Rahkesh didn't even acknowledge the City Master as he followed him into the massive arched hallway that led to the first hall.

"Well I can understand why you enjoy teaching so much…all those fine young things around." Vladimir Konovalov said with a leer. He glanced sideways but Tristan just adopted a mildly pitying expression. "Cyala is trying to arrange a training scrimmage with the Vashora."

"What are they saying?" Tristan asked.

"I think they're busy scoping out Akren's little thunderbird." Vladimir replied dryly.

Though Rahkesh did not speak Russian and could not understand what they were saying he did follow the slight turn of Vladimir's head and saw the two fae watching him. Staring at him actually. Two tall, green, vashora females. They were nearly two meters tall, pale green skin, darker green hair, slanted shining green/gold eyes. Pointed ears, flaring eyebrows, and a body type that might be considered 'elfin' except the elves would kill if they heard that. They were wearing armor in green and gold metals and Rahkesh could feel the bloodmagic, even if it was different from anything he'd ever sensed before.

"Fascinating smell our Thunder has acquired." Vladmimir continued casually, asking for information. Tristan raised an eyebrow just a little bit, but didn't otherwise reply. Mentally he was watching as Rahkesh observed the fae fixed on him. It had only been an hour since they had discovered the source of Rahkesh's difficulties with his snake magic, but Rahkesh had adapted fast. No longer confused he had completely melded with his basilisk form. The change in the young mortal was astonishing, once he had stopped fighting his snake form and let it settle into him the way his thunderbird had. Now he was showing the thunderbird's fiery temper and the snake's cunning.

Rahkesh probably hadn't noticed but he didn't make a single sound as he moved, and he was showing the snake movement patterns, sleek and graceful, except in human form he looked more feline than reptilian. It had always been possible to smell the lighting and storm around Rahkesh, ever since his thunderbird came into being. Now a tangy venomous hissing power wrapped around him as well. Given what the basilisk was going through Rahkesh s_melled_ aggressive, and he seemed unaware of it. And he couldn't have hidden the power flowing around him if he'd tried. The basilisk was showing off as much as it could in human form. And the City Master walking beside them was practically salivating. Tristan glanced at the other vampire for a moment, and offered up a silent prayer for patience to long forgotten gods, wondering how much chaos Rahkesh would cause before the first meeting was over. Not that it wouldn't be amusing to see a few City Masters get their fangs knocked out, but they did, regrettably, have more important things to be doing.

The two Vashora were following them silently, not even making an effort to appear uninterested. Apparently there would be a lot of trouble. But what would the Vashora want with Rahkesh? The two disengaged suddenly and slipped off as other fae started arriving. They met up with a few Vascari and those two turned to glance at Rahkesh as well. Tristan dimly wondered if perhaps the demons would attack the gathering, which might be easier than having to deal with Rahkesh getting into a fight with the fae Council.

Uncomfortable under the staring Rahkesh looked forward as if he hadn't seen them. Better to just act like all the attention was below him. Inside was an immense hall, the seating was in three-quarters of a circle around a small podium. There were a variety of beings scattered everywhere in small groups. Rahkesh took a rough count and guessed there was room for maybe a hundred people total. A fraction of the total. The main hall where all the representatives could meet was elsewhere. This was one of the rooms where subgroups would be interviewing "experts" on their knowledge of demons. The room was in warm colors, red and deep burgundy. The ceiling was gilded with gold and red dragons, heavy dark red curtains hung by the massive windows.

Rahkesh spotted Moody standing off to one side with Relora and Daniel. Rahkesh wandered over to join them, ignoring the refreshment table. There were two more Vashora over there and he didn't want to deal with them.

"Evening Thunder." Moody said. "What happened?"

"Nothing." Rahkesh said, glancing around.

"Yeah, right. And the Vashora are stalking you just because you're pretty." Relora told him. "You smell different."

"My basilisk form." Rahkesh sighed, "I just finished completing melding with it, and this time of year my species is battling for territory."

"Scent concealing spells?" Daniel asked. Rahkesh actually winced at the response; he almost hit the werewolf before he realized that he was being pushed by the basilisk's instincts.

"No. Snake instincts won't allow it." Rahkesh said, fighting not to shudder as he felt the parselmagic raging at the suggestion. Was it not a mighty beast? This was it's time to fight! And this _mammal_ dared to suggest it should HIDE! Rahkesh clamped down viciously on the basilisk's fury, recognizing that it was beginning the effect his mind, keeping it separate from himself was becoming more difficult.

"How much longer?" Moody asked.

"One week. I think. Maybe." Rahkesh said. That information had been in a general book on basilisks in the Akren library. All of the species fought for territory at different times, but for all the urges only lasted a few weeks. Since Rahkesh had already experienced the frantic magical winding leading up to this (during which he had started increasing his bloodmagic rituals to compensate) he expected it would be over soon.

"Great. Right in time for the Conclave." Moody said appreciatively. "I love your timing Thunder." Rahkesh hissed at him before he realized what he was doing. Moody's bark of laughter made everyone wince.

"Fine for you to laugh. I just hope the fae Council stays away. I don't think I can keep the snake and my mind separate if they start being irritating." Rahkesh grumbled.

"What if they finally get over themselves and apologize?"

"I have no idea." Rahkesh admitted. He hadn't considered that they might actually do that.

"Better think of something." Moody said, nodding over Rahkesh's shoulder. Rahkesh didn't turn, forcing the approaching fae to move around to the side a little. Daniel and Relora moved away discreetly. Moody planted himself beside Rahkesh and didn't budge, not even when the lone Vashora glared at him. A Vashora, they weren't part of the fae Council, so what was this one doing? Rahkesh wondered as the fae turned to face him.

-

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	17. Chapter 17

Jimm – there's a reason why he told them so much, I'll get to it.

Von – heh I'm glad you enjoyed it so much – did he give the information away freely?

Silvergem – everyone seems to commenting on that, all is explained here.

CocoaGirl2 – nope, no one else from Hogwarts will join Akren.

SomeGuyFawkes – sooner than that! Maybe 2 chapter until that point, maybe less…

Poruchik Potter – nice! no one else caught that, those dementors will be back…sort of

Id -yeah that would be a cool pairing, but no. the tree will return eventually.

Freakygirl340 – no the Chachapoyaro and the elves are not genetically related.

FlightyFluschia – glad you enjoyed this so much!

Chapter 17

The Vashora fae was about as tall as Rahkesh. Despite being various shades of green from head to toe he was still a handsome fellow, with a thin scar on the upper left side of his forehead that ran off towards his ear. Keen bright green eyes with no whites, just darker green where the whites would be on a human, eyed Rahkesh impassively, giving nothing away.

Before Rahkesh could say anything the fae held out his hand. His four large black claws were mostly retracted into the back of his hand. Rahkesh immediately flashed back to Vashora customs and responded with the Vashora version of saying hello; clasping hands raised at chest level and an inclination of the head. Mentally he was congratulating himself for reading up on the more public and simple of fae customs after the Council had attacked him. The Vashora smiled, showing two sets of canine teeth, one where those on a human were located, the others just in front, the same place where a vampire's fangs were. His green eyes bored into Rahkesh's, Rahkesh sealed off his mind instantly and checked all his mental shields.

"I am Saelin, lead representative for the Vashora," he stated in perfect English with an odd lilt to it. "The Vashora Chiefs requested that I speak to you before the Conclave." Rahkesh raised an eyebrow, Saelin turned away and Rahkesh followed, waving at Moody not to bother. Moody thumped his walking stick hard on the ground and turned away to go hunt down some old friends. The fae led him a little ways away and Rahkesh felt silencing wards go up.

"Your warriors were at the portal activation in Mexico." Rahkesh said, "I didn't hear if they had any casualties." It was a lie. The Vashora had reported one dead during the fight, but both the Mexican aurors and the vampires claimed to have seen the same number of Vashora leaving as had entered the cavern. So the death report may well have been a blatant lie. If so no one had any idea why. Namach had laughed long and hard about it when Daray had complained. But he often acted nuttier than a mad hatter anyway.

Rahkesh wasn't going to let them know if he was as confused as everyone else or not, better keep it an unknown, make them wonder. He would have been cautious about lying to a fae, but the Vashora were not one of the species that could instinctively hear a lie. They had truth tellers, but those were all recognizable by the way their eyes glowed when they used the ability. Of course they could manipulate pheromones, scents, and use chemical communication as well as plants could, but his basilisk was blocking all of that with its dry spicy scent. They couldn't smell his lies at the moment.

"Of course not." Saelin said dismissively, "they were only demons." Rahkesh raised an eyebrow but didn't respond. If the demons were that easy to deal with the Vashora wouldn't be worried about them at all.

"Is there a reason why I warrant such scrutiny by your guards?" Rahkesh asked, guessing (correctly though he didn't know it) that the other Vashora who had been following him were guarding their representatives.

"Not particularly. We were hoping to be present if the fae Council decided to contact you." Saelin replied. "You know of course that we are not part of that sadly misguided organization." He added contemptuously.

"Of course." Rahkesh replied.

"Oh good." Saelin said, pleasantly. "My people wished to make sure you did not blame us for that ridiculous little fiasco last year with your soul." Rahkesh nodded, little fiasco…right. "Now," Saelin continued, getting to the point, "the fae Council will be offering their apologies at some point during the Conclave. However, it is our belief that they plan to do so by proxy, even though most of the Council is present."

"Then perhaps I should accept by proxy." Rahkesh replied. Saelin's eyes narrowed, then he grinned wolfishly.

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"I was thinking of sending my familiar."

"They'll be sending an Akren student as the messenger." Saelin said, watching him closely.

"And therefore I should respond with someone equally lowly, however my familiar doesn't speak any language they know. So all they'll get is a nod." Rahkesh replied. Sygra wound her way up from his belt to his shoulders and looked over at Saelin.

"Ah, one of the Forgotten." Saelin said softly. "I doubt they'll recognize her though." Rahkesh started at Saelin's recognition of what Sygra was, but didn't ask about it.

"I'll send her back with their messenger. I think getting just a nod should be enough."

"Or you could just ignore them until they come themselves."

"Someone sends you a messenger it's only polite to respond." Rahkesh said. Saelin nodded.

"Our informers said you were intelligent and well mannered."

"You don't have people following me around because my disagreement with the Council amuses you." Rahkesh stated. Saelin's green eyes fixed on his.

"No." Rahkesh rotated a bit, leaving Saelin with his back to two walls, in a corner. Both had long mirrors running floor to ceiling. Rahkesh could see behind himself easily. But Saelin wasn't going anywhere. Saelin didn't seem to notice, or care. He was fixed on Rahkesh, moving closer until they were only a few feet apart. "We Vashora are separate from all other fae. We cannot interbreed with any other species, we cannot become werewolves – like some veela can, and we cannot become vampires - like some are Amadan can. We have a comfortable balance with the other species. However this could be quickly upset if you were to become a vampire. Our Chiefs feel that it is in our best interests if this does not happen. You have expressed a wish to remain mortal?"

Rahkesh nodded, "yes, and that will not be changing, regardless of who offers to turn me."

"There are plenty of vampires who have expressed the sentiment that for the good of their species you should be turned, even if you do not wish to be. We want you to stay mortal. So we'll be keeping an eye on you at the Council, just in case." Saelin said.

Rahkesh gritted his teeth as the basilisk raged. _Protection! From this mammal! Not even cold blooded! This poorly evolved degenerate fae thought he needed its protection!_ Rahkesh hissed softly, not noticing that Saelin was backing up as Rahkesh's eyes began to glow a cold gold and the irises expanded, leaving no whites. A tiny hint of lightning crackled around Rahkesh's finger tips, thankfully it made no noise. Rahkesh snapped back to the present and focused hard on the fae. Killing-curse green streaks slowly appeared in his eyes and his magic stirring the air around them. A soft deathly hissing sound rushed from him as Rahkesh stepped forward, locked on the now-wary fae.

"As much as I appreciate your offer of protection _Vashora_ I do not want or need your help against the vampires." Rahkesh hissed out, mostly English with a light parseltongue undercurrent.

Saelin glared, and stopped backing up. "A mortal human with the soul of the thunderbird and the snake form of a basilisk, a parseltongue, a being who is headed towards being one of the youngest bloodmages the human species has ever fielded, a fighter who has crossed blades with the demons more often than anyone else now alive, you wonder why we watch you? Fear what will happen if you join the vampires?"

"I don't care what your reasons are. You _will_ stay out of my way, even if the vampires attack. It is none of your business. And should you make it your business you'll lose just as much as the vampires will." Rahkesh snarled.

"Let me give you another reason then," Saelin said softly, unruffled "you are the first human to ingest raw dragon's blood and live."

Rahkesh stepped back as though hit, Sygra's hood flared and she hissed, stretching forwards. Rahkesh stared hard at Saelin's gleaming eyes. How did they know? How could they possibly know?

The basilisk lashed out and Rahkesh agreed, and responded. Saelin's eyes went wide as a fist of air crushed his throat and the air began to smell heavily of poison. Vaporized basilisk venom flowing from Rahkesh's magic. Swirling around the two, making both their noses hurt with its acidic deadly vapor.

"_How?"_

"No one told us, needn't worry about that." Saelin choked out, unresisting the grip on his neck, he sounded bitter, "everyone is remarkably close-mouthed about you. Wouldn't give us the time of day. We sent in a tracker, she smelled it in your blood during the fight in Mexico. And no, we have not and will not share that knowledge."

"What are you watching _for_?"

"Whatever happens next." Saelin said, "your soul is fascinating little human. You are a catalyst like nothing else in our records since Tristan Namach and Cyala Ateres were human. You are far too involved in this thing with the demons, and too deeply connected to the problems in Europe, and too strongly affiliated with bloodmagic. Your raw magical potential surpasses Merlin. We want to know what is going to happen to you because today you do not have the skill and practice to use that magic, but someday you will. You were born with more magical ability than any human now alive, but so far you have only manifested the raw potential in your animagus form. The only place your use of magic shows potential is in bloodmagic. It is very strange. Most humans train to become very skilled to compensate for having less magic, you have the magic but haven't yet trained in the finesse of its use. Yet everything unusual happens around you. You're a magical anomaly, we're curious." Rahkesh had slowly lessened his hold as Saelin spoke, and now Saelin magically broke through the last of it with a small shake of his head. Saelin walked past Rahkesh and out of the anti-eavesdropping wards. "Now if you'll excuse me, the rest of my kin have arrived."

Anyone who had been watching their little confrontation turned away before Rahkesh could identify them, but he wasn't really trying. He called back his magic and felt his eyes become human again, loosing the snake-ish look. He didn't want anyone to see that. However, the basilisk didn't care, and neither did the thunderbird. Rahkesh turned to watch Saelin join a large group of several fae species, puzzling over what the fae had said. A catalyst? Why did that feel ominous?

_Many are watching you. I sense your little display of basilisk power did not go unnoticed._

_Not surprising. I made no effort to hide._

_Basilisks never should. _

_Sygra._

_Truth. _

_I was hoping to not attract much attention_ Rahkesh sighed, wishing his basilisk was back to its usual imperturbable self. It was supposed to keep the thunderbird calm!

_Well he did speak the truth._ Sygra finally spoke.

_Am I really that much more powerful than average?_ Rahkesh wondered, he knew he was skilled at bloodmagic and that his soul was unusually strong. But did he really have that much magic?

_No. Not power. You don't have that yet, won't until you're fully trained in the minutiae the use of the magic. You have more raw magic than average. And average is made up of extremes. You were simply born as the most extreme._ Sygra said.

_And I'm apparently a catalyst of some sort?_

_One is probably a function of the other. _Sygra said.

_Probably. But if I have so much magic why can't I do thread magic?_

_Possibly because you have the magic but not the knowledge to use it. Clearly you can connect to your magical core better than most, bloodmagic requires it. But channeling it into objects and using objects to influence reality takes a different mind._

_Or better threads. _Rahkesh suggested

_Or that._

_They mentioned both my drinking dragon's blood and that they want to know what's going to happen. That means that they have reason to expect something will. _Rahkesh said with some trepidation. The demons and school and his snake form were enough to keep him busy.

_They think something is going to happen, and it's something that they have a real interest in. That does sound ominous_. Sygra agreed with his earlier thought. _Only two months three weeks left to live and they're watching _you. _Ah well, this is why you have such a brilliant familiar, to get you through this._

_You find this amusing!_ Rahkesh accused.

_Well you have to admit that you're rarely bored._ Sygra pointed out. Then settled for hissing laughter when Rahkesh swore softly and ended the discussion. Rahkesh felt a gentle touch on his mind and turned, feeling out his link to Sharahak he went across the hall to the back doors. Sharahak was nervous, and excited.

The big dark red and gold doors opened a moment later. The entire hall went silent as they slowly swung inwards, and the big cream and grey demon walked, upright, into the room. On his hind legs Sharahak was a bit taller than Rahkesh, and with his wings arching high over his head he looked much, much, larger. His scaled and leathery hide gleamed under the lights and the gray patterns on his creamy hide looked exquisite. Long dark silver claws were curled under so he could walk on them, his tail held just off the ground. The thin array of spines that guarded his neck were smoothed flat so they were almost invisible and looked, mixed with his heavy sharp-edged neck scales, a bit like a mane. Rahkesh could feel Sharahak's nerves spike at the stares. Rahkesh went to him at once, since no one else was moving. Sharahak cast him a warm smile, demon warm anyway, and a grateful look.

"They like to stare don't they?" Rahkesh asked softly, though in the quiet everyone could hear him a little. "Funny how those who seem the most sophisticated are also the rudest." The look Sharahak gave him was painfully grateful.

Everyone in the room paused, then conversation started up again, with more than a few amused or annoyed looks thrown at Rahkesh. Rahkesh grinned in a not-so-pleasant manner. The basilisk wanted to be noticed, and had deliberatly driven him to challenge the entire room. He led Sharahak over to the refreshment table, now that the Vashora had vacated it. Sharahak went to the end full of treats the Vashora and werewolves liked, and picked out a few cubes of red meat from a platter swimming in fresh blood. Somewhere, distantly bells began to toll. Perhaps they would start soon?

"Ignore them all." Rahkesh said. "Actually you could go and really make a scene with those wings everywhere." Sharahak raised an eyebrow and chuckled in a demonic way.

"Make a scene? _You're_ suggestion this? Feeling alright?" Sharahak asked. Rahkesh sighed.

"Ignore me too then. I'm a little off."

"You smell it." Sharahak stated, his eyes holding a question. "And everyone in the room is feeling it."

Rahkesh shifted to the Chachapoyaro language unhappily, he didn't like speaking it, too much chance someone would recognize it. And it brought back memories. "Basilisks fight for territory this time of year. Toss in a Thunderbird – you know they're naturally one of the most violent beings" Rahkesh shifted back to English to continue, "then yes, it's a bad time of year."

"Bad? Goodness Rahkesh if you call this bad I'd hate to see what you call fantastic. You're just about making people dizzy."

"As you just pointed out, I don't like making a scene."

"Why not shield then?"

"I am, as much a possible. I can't hide this. Basilisk form won't let me. It's damn proud of itself, getting everyone's attention." Rahkesh grumbled. Sharahak laughed. "Not funny, I hate being on display."

"I recognized your magic from all the way out in the hall a few minutes ago." Sharahak replied gently, in the Chachapoyaro tongue this time. Rahkesh winced.

"Not that language. Someone might catch on." He asked. Sharahak eyed him a moment then nodded.

"Tristan explained to me about the demons bringing the plague through. You were the one who sensed it?" Sharahak asked.

"Yeah."

"I had not thought humans could do that." Sharahak said. "Sensing a disease I mean.

"Magically driven disease." Rahkesh corrected. "And since when have I been normal?"

"I suspect never." Sharahak said, "I've been hearing the most interesting stories since getting to this time."

"Good ones?" Rahkesh asked. Sharahak just gave him an amused look.

"It was your homeland that was the most devastated. How are you holding up?" Sharahak asked.

"Very well. I hate to say it but that place needed a good cleansing." Rahkesh admitted. "Everyone worthwhile got out. And this plague has been awfully convenient in stopping the local insane warlord. Unfortunately it has spread all over most of Europe. I haven't had time to read all of the reports being sent out. But what I have read sounds horrible. Rotting corpses in the streets and such. There's been a lot of aid sent from overseas, mostly for getting children out alive. The vampires and some of the fae have been fantastic at that."

"And the muggles haven't noticed?" Sharahak asked disbelievingly.

"They've been finding an increase of random dead bodies turning up. You remember how fast this plague rots stuff. The muggles don't have enough to figure out what killed them, so they don't know it was a disease, so they have nothing to worry about. And the magical/nonmagical worlds are more separate here than almost anywhere else in the world."

"Daray said he's been having some unpleasant flashbacks and dreams." Sharahak said.

"Same here." Rahkesh admitted. "But I've been so busy I don't have time for it."

"How much longer until it burns itself out?"

"Soon I hope. New reports are slowing down some. Hundreds of thousands are dead. It's exactly the same as last time you know. It can only last for a few days in the air. It needs magical human bodies. Maybe it'll start going away soon. Of course no one will go back until months after it's vanished."

"We don't have months." Sharahak reminded him.

"No we don't. Which is why everyone's switching focus to the demons. We can't exactly rebuild when we're all about to be attacked can we?" Rahkesh agreed.

A polite cough from behind them made them both turn. Vladimir Konovalov was there. He was a cold-looking vampire. Sharp features that could have been described as "regal". Tonight he was wearing dark gray and dark red, with a little silver and a few rubies, no weapons.

Rahkesh eyed the vampire warily, almost hissing in annoyance at the interruption. The urge to _flatten _Konovalov, tear him apart, was almost bearably strong. Rahkesh reigned it in, feeling, with some relief, that his eyes hadn't shifted at all and this time he'd managed to keep the magic in check. That one had been just in his mind. The basilisk's lethal power wrapped tight around him and he searched for memories of the thunderbird, letting a distant rumble of thunder in his subconscious sooth him. After eyeing the vampire in manner not unlike that someone like Lucius Malfoy might use when examining a lesser being Rahkesh relaxed and decided that it was his place to introduce everyone.

"Lord Konovalov." Rahkesh stated, knowing from Daray's earlier bow and quick acknowledgment that this City Master used his last name. He turned to Sharahak, "the vampires have been consistent since you were last in this world. With the usual territoriality." Sharahak didn't need to hear that, but Rahkesh was making a point to Konovalov – by deliberately focusing on Sharahak and giving the City Master a dismissive sort of attention. He turned back to the waiting vampire, "Sharahak, Vladimir Konovalov City Master of Moscow. Lord Konovalov, Sharahak – formerly a vampire." Sharahak chuckled and nodded to the tall vampire. Konovalov had paused to take in Rahkesh's attitude, now he focused solely on Sharahak.

"Sadly I was created only a little while before your unfortunate trip to the demon realm, so we have never met." Konovalov said in smooth flawless English, "welcome back Elder." Sharahak paused then nodded slowly. Other vampires in range had been listening closely, now they all moved away a little. Konovalov had just acknowledged Sharahak's place as one of the ancients, despite no longer being a vampire. Apparently he was vampire enough for Konovalov to show respect, the others would follow suit.

"Sharahak," came a gentle voice from their side. This was another vampire, a City Master.

"Anandi, Master of El Salvador." Konovalov said, acknowledging his fellow ruler with a nod. Sharahak ignored him, rotating fully to face Anandi, making everyone move out of the way of his wings. Konovalov looked vaguely annoyed.

"Anandi, they didn't tell me you were still running around terrorizing the muggles." Sharahak said enthusiastically, smiling broadly, his voice pleased and amused. Anandi, who originated in what was present-day Spain, though her ancestry was very mixed, was a true beauty. Dark curling hair and sharp blue eyes, stereotypical vampire-pale skin that looked exquisite with her deep blue clothing, which looked a little like an actual suit.

"Good to see you too Shar. Damn, I think I liked you better when my neck didn't hurt looking at you." Anandi said, standing on her toes for a moment. Vampires might often select specially for height but Anandi was probably the shortest female vampire there. Daray claimed this was the reason why she was also one of the most cruel and vicious, over compensation. Her bloody tendencies made it curious that she and Sharahak were apparently such good friends. "Though those colors are awfully nice." She added, reaching up to run a finger boldly over the gray patterning on Sharahak's wing. "How is it? Being able to fly?"

"Almost good enough to compensate for being a demon." Sharahak admitted. "El Salvador?"

"I wanted an entire country, not just a city, and not too big an area, better control with a smaller area." Anandi shrugged.

"You always were ambitious." Sharahak muttered, grinning. "Is it as fun as you thought it would be?"

"Oh more than!" Anandi said. She and Sharahak fell into a discussion of her doings in El Salvador. Relieved Sharahak was relaxing a little Rahkesh went to find out who knew the schedule for the evening, when a vampire got in his way.

"Ah Rahkesh, at last we meet. Or should I call you Thunder?" This one asked. A fanged smile that didn't quite reach his eyes lighting up his face.

"Just call him Thunder, Hadrian, it drives him crazy." Xanthius advised with a smile, appearing as thought from thin air beside Hadrian. Rahkesh sneered at him. The elf just raised single arched eyebrow. His white hair looked like silk and practically glowed. His stunning eyes blazed in his face, standing out sharply from his white hair and white top, which was made from some type of leather Rahkesh had never seen before. Probably elven in origin. There was a thin band of what appeared to be white-gold around his brow, studded with some sort of jewels, holding his hair close and showing off his elegant pointed ears clearly. "Perhaps we should make that some sort of unofficial code name hmm?" Xanthius asked, ignoring Rahkesh's ire. "Perhaps only Akren alumni can use it?"

"Better tell Konovalov then." Rahkesh growled out.

"He is an alumnus." Xanthius muttered, an unusual sound from the elf.

"Not according to the records." Rahkesh replied sharply.

"Long story involving Cyala Ateres, a five-way-body-transfer, several parallel universes, and some mixed up time travel." Xanthius said before Hadrian could speak. The vampire shook his head and Rahkesh decided _that_ explanation could wait.

"Hadrian…as in the Master of London?" Rahkesh asked. He had only ever met with Hadrian's various deputies, never with the City Master himself. And while Rahkesh had a high opinion of Ambrosius he did not like Farov at all. So which of his seconds was Hadrian more like? The handsome vampire sketched a very short bow, more of an extended nod. He was dressed dark red and black head to toe with a hint of gold thread, not a single weapon anywhere, a long billowing black and red open-fronted long coat with cream and black silk lining, sharp finely etched features, long nose and intelligent dark hazel eyes.

"The very one." He said with a tiny smirk. Rahkesh decided to go for vaguely rude rather than respectful. Hadrian's searching for information about him was making him nervous, and angry since Hadrian could have just asked.

"Yes. The very one who has been turning over every stone in Britain looking for my origin – with no effect I might add. I am amused by your efforts… I have my sources too." Rahkesh said, looking down his nose. Hadrian stared. Then recovered from being addressed in such a manner, so abrupt and criticizing. Xanthius watched, a little smugly.

"It would be easier if you would just tell me."

"It would be easier if you realized how futile your efforts are, and how little it matters." Rahkesh replied coolly, the basilisk partly driving his snarky attitude. "A pity we have not met before this; I would have mentioned the useless waste of time and energy, spared you the effort." He was implying, of course, that he had enjoyed watching Hadrian's vampires struggle, knowing that they were wasting their time. Rahkesh had expected more annoyance. Instead Hadrian laughed, a nice laugh, a gentle sound of real amusement.

"Consider them removed then Thunder." Hadrian said a real smile, "clearly you are worthy of the regard given you."

Rahkesh recovered from his surprise very quickly, without showing it. The basilisk hissed, pleased at the acknowledgement, Rahkesh ignored that side of his brain. His behavior was bordering on inexcusably rude because of the snake anyway, and he was bouncing around magically like a rubber ball. He heaved a regretful sigh.

"I suppose being of Akren wasn't quite enough to decide that?"

"Don't tell Nvara will you?" Hadrian joked.

"Might be a little hazardous to your health." Xanthius said. Hadrian grimaced a little.

"I won't, so long as you tell me something." Rahkesh said. "who's actually in charge of this thing?"

Hadrian and Xanthius laughed at this. "It is a little out of control." Hadrian agreed, "there was a minor commotion when the acromatula arrived and accidentally got webbing all over one of the halls."

"They what?" Rahkesh asked instantly flashing back to the giant spider Aragog.

"They claim it was accidental. The transportation method didn't agree with them. Apparently no one, not even them, thought to check first if portkeys agree with the acromatula silk-producing system." Hadrain said. "The seats are enchanted, naturally. And somehow the spells used to remove acromatula webbing reacted with the enchantments, and, well…the results were problematic."

"Uh huh." Rahkesh said, thinking that, this being the magical world, he probably should have guessed something like that.

"It's almost sorted out." Xanthius said. "No harm done."

"The person leading the Conclave is Mrs. Adriana Stocklir," Hadrian said, "She won't start things until everything's perfect. She's just past her 83rd year and was one of the best tacticians in the war with Grindelwald. Enough so that the Chinese recently called on her help to solve their little problem with their own mad-man wanting to take over the world."

"A logical choice then." Rahkesh said. "What has she been doing with all the commotion in Europe this last year?"

"She was born in Switzerland, but she hasn't lived in Switzerland for forty years, she was their ambassador to the vampires at one time. She's been most unhappy with her countrymen since they went and joined Britain's little lets-get-rid-of-other-species party. She's been the driving force behind their recent revolution. And the one who personally banished half the old government. She was declared interim Minister yesterday. She's getting old but her mind certainly hasn't suffered any for it." Hadrian explained. "I suppose the poor woman is off calming the acromatula and arranging for a different transport system. Though I can't imagine what, they hate the floo."

"I'm amazed everyone has been able to get here, especially since it was rather short notice. If the acromatula are the only problem that's awfully impressive." Rahkesh said. Hadrian and Xanthius exchanged a worried look.

"Not everyone is here. The Sirens never responded to the original summons, and they haven't shown up." Xanthius said.

"Some of the harpies went to find them; the islands are apparently empty and show no sign of anyone being there for some time." Hadrian added.

"The sea demons?" Rahkesh asked.

"Perhaps. The merepeople have reported that the sea demons they had offered to track have all vanished, including the one in Loch Ness." Xanthius said. "If anything has actually happen to the sirens there will be hell to pay when the other fae find out."

A bell began to ring somewhere in the room and everyone turned towards the sound. One of the big red and gold doors had opened. A small army of acromatula entered, followed by a very old woman. Less than half of the thousand or so representatives were in the hall, yet with the addition of ten acromatula it was packed uncomfortably tight.

The woman was tiny. Solid gray hair cut very close to her head framed a wrinkled face a tiny clear hazel eyes. She had pearls hanging from both ears and wore pale suit pants and jacket over a colorful red and blue silk shirt. Several heavy gold chains hung around her neck, a pair of glasses attached to one. She smiled out at the crowd and put the bell aside on a table by the door.

"Hello everyone. Sorry about the delay. Now the way this is going to work is this; one subgroup will go over all known demonic activity in the past few thousand years. The military-oriented representatives your were asked to bring are already meeting and working on an agreement to allow teams to travel easily across the borders in emergencies. A third sub group will receive a briefing on locations of all the demon portals we know about, plus maps for you to share. A fourth group will be hearing from experts on how to manage public fears and how to get the public involved in their own defense. Recordings of every meeting will be available to everyone. We'll meet again tomorrow to go over memories of demon fighting techniques, the magics known to work against them, and then have some time for every species representatives to meet to exchange information. We'll continue from there later."

There was a murmur of agreement from the gathered beings. Clearly Mrs. Stocklir had put some thought into how to manage the crowds of representatives present.

"Everyone here who is not a representative should be now receiving a room location for today." Mrs. Stocklir continued. Rahkesh blinked and found a piece of paper in his hand with a map and one of the halls marked. The main hall where everyone could meet was empty; he supposed they would all meet there on the third day. Attached was a second sheet with the places he needed to be for the nest few days. He only had one place he needed to be that day. And he needed to get to both of the earlier meetings the next day, but he had that afternoon and evening free. Good, he _did_ still have work to do for school. The Headmistress had allowed the students who had to be at the Conclave to use the school time-turners, Rahkesh had a feeling he'd be using his a lot.

"Are they making you go to everything?" Xanthius asked as Sharahak as the demon rejoined them.

"No. I'll be speaking to the entire Conclave in a few days." Sharahak said with some relief.

"They'll have you there forever." Rahkesh warned.

"Maybe, maybe not. Tristan and I have been working at setting up pensieves with my relevant memories."

"Too invasive?" Rahkesh asked carefully. Sharahak thought about that for a few moments.

"No. Tristan has been very careful. Just observations that will be projected for everyone to see. Conversations I listened too, what was explained to me in my first few weeks there, stuff like that. Most of it is from my first few years in that realm, since once I had it figured out, and realized I wasn't coming back"…Sharahak trailed off before continuing…"I went and hid." Sharahak admitted, with a twitch on unease. Rahkesh thought that no matter how long Sharahak might live he was unlikely to ever fully recover from his time in the demon realm. Sharahak was not particularly violent, nor did he have the normal vampire aggressive/assertive behavior issues.

"Well I'm first up, with Daray and Silas. I suppose you should probably come along, the others will take several days to view those memories." Rahkesh said. Sharahak nodded, Daray and Silas appeared beside them a few moments later, Nuri at Silas heels. The panther yowled warningly at everyone, just to announce his presence and make sure everyone knew that _he_ was there, then went and rubbed up against Xanthius's legs.

"Great. Of course. How natural. Black cat-hair goes so well with white!" Xanthius said with fake enthusiasm. Drawing laughter from everyone in earshot. "You're a genius Nuri." Nuri rumbled approvingly that yes, he was indeed a genius, and went back to guarding Silas. Giving a warning growl to the nearest vampires as he did. Silas rolled his eyes and shrugged apologetically at his elders. Cats would be cats.

Daray went around them to the other side and caught Hadrian's attention.

"Lord Hadrian, grandmother wishes to arrange an agreement for our family to do a scan of your territory for demonic presences." Daray said politely. Hadrian frowned, swirling the blood in his goblet.

"I assume this is the family animagus at work? Dark Angels have this ability?"

"Newly discovered." Daray confirmed. Hadrian thought about it for a moment longer.

"Very well. We can meet after the third day of the Conclave."

"The vampires are meeting then anyway." Silas said softly to Rahkesh. "Big get together at the City Master's place. Probably over a hundred of us, mostly the upper ranking ones, plus assorted apprentices and followers. Daray and I are going along. I suppose grandmother wants to start showing off how well our magics are turning out."

"And gloating at everyone else that she turned you two." Rahkesh said. Silas chuckled.

"Oh yes. She's the envy of the vampire world right now."

"Sounds like fun." Rahkesh said a little sarcastically.

"There's a thought to invite you." Silas warned. "I think some of them are going to want to go over our battles with those demons a thousand years ago a second time."

"I am not getting dragged along to any vampire gathering." Rahkesh stated firmly. "I'm sure you and Daray can cover everything adequately."

"Afraid they'll try to turn you?"

"Not really." Rahkesh replied. "I just don't feel at all interested in your little parties."

"I think Andrew Farov is providing the entertainment."

"Then that'll be an absolute no." Rahkesh replied, wincing. Much as he liked knowing Lucius Malfoy was out of the political picture he didn't need to even imagine what Favor had been doing to the man.

"Aw, no tasty mortal sex slaves?' Silas snickered at him. Rahkesh glared and turned Silas's hair neon orange wandlessly. "Oh come on!" Silas complained. "Orange is not my color."

Rahkesh headed for the doors, followed by a very amused Sharahak and Daray, and a fuming Silas, who managed to cancel the hair coloring just before they hit the busy hallways. It was just a good thing there were none of the skyeyes – magical video cameras - in the hall they had been in, so the whole world wouldn't get that image.

The skyeyes would be recording every speech given, except from the group working on public involvement, so everyone would get to see his presentation. Not comforting, though the basilisk was already just about purring, if snakes could purr. Around his shoulders Sygra laughed at the strange looks the group was getting. Between the big creamy winged Sharahak drawing wide-eyed looks and Rahkesh's simmering fire making heads turn, and Nuri strutting along beside Silas, tail tip held high, they were drawing a bit of attention from everyone.

"Why haven't I ever heard of Stocklir before?" Rahkesh asked Daray. Daray shrugged.

"She wasn't around. Her daughter was some sort of crazy genius with experimental healing magics. Unfortunately, as often happens, something didn't work right and blew up rather spectacularly, killed her and her husband. Old Mrs. Stocklir has had to raise all three of her grandchildren. Then she's been in China for a while, and, well, you know how secretive their magical community is."

"Yes, but if she was so involved in the war with Grindelwald I would have thought I'd have heard of her." Rahkesh said.

"But she was never on the front lines." Daray said. "Just engineering the battles. And she wasn't being employed by Switzerland then anyway, she was working for the Americans."

"And you're from Europe. Home schooled or not the education system over there isn't all that great." Silas pointed out.

"True enough." Rahkesh muttered. "I did have a history tutor, he never mentioned Mrs. Stocklir…actually he didn't say much about the war with Grindelwald at all." Which was almost the truth, except it had been Professor Binns who'd left that out.

"The most important recent magical conflict." Daray said.

"Yeah well, he liked to focus on the more recent shit with Voldemort." Rahkesh protested. He was very good at keeping up his act of his false identity. So much so that it almost felt like truth. If you told the same lies enough times they started to feel real even in your own mind. Rahkesh found that comforting; it meant he was less likely to slip up.

The hall they were in was a massive room, the walls hung with silks, and with sharply sloped rows of blue seats. In the front was a long table and off to the side a wooden podium. Rahkesh leaned on the edge of the table, as casually as if he wasn't facing the top representatives of all magical life forms, in addition to the entire magical world. The Basilisk shivered and hissed, had he been in snake form it would have been preening and showing off. Rahkesh wrapped himself in a layering of thunderbird magic and pulled some of the basilisk's presence back, drawing into himself through his bloodmagic. He wanted people to actually be able to hear what he was saying rather than be distracted by the currently overwhelming magic presence of his hyped-up basilisk-self.

Apparently some representatives had arrived early. There were nearly twenty fairies in the back of the room already. Completely different from fae the fairies were tiny; the largest type maybe half again as long as Rahkesh's forearm, with the smallest variety being about the size of his palm. Demons considered them a rare delicacy, and farmed them. Not related to the very similar pixies, fairies were more hominid-like and much more intelligent. Pixies were basically mindless. Fairies even built machines and had sports teams. They hardly ever left their colonies, mostly hidden deep in the woods. Their brightly colored wispy wings were hard to hide. Every one had hair to its waist and they ranged in color from bright purple to two yellow and silver creatures with what appeared to be tiny, flowery, living plants growing from their wings. The little beings were magical but had little to no offensive powers of any sort. On the rare occasions that muggles discovered a colony it was usually wiped out in days. Fortunately once dead they decayed completely to dirt in maybe a day or two so the muggles could never keep any as evidence. They could only fight indirectly. With muggles destroying their colonies there were very few fairies left. The ones that remained were fighting back by altering mosquitoes to carry lethal illnesses, spreading toxic plants, generally spreading diseases, and causing insect infestations in muggles homes and farms. They also worked hard at transporting around viruses and bacteria that could kill muggles.

The other magical beings hadn't interfered with this silent war. The fae sided with the fairies, as did the merepeople, goblins, fauns, centaurs, leprechauns, acromatula, and the elves (when anyone got up enough nerve to ask). Even if most magical humans thought they should find a way to resolve it the fairies were proud and refused help. They hated muggles passionately and were determined to get revenge. So everyone generally politely ignored the biological warfare going on. Rahkesh had never seen a fairy before, and had to stop himself from staring.

_Tasty?_ Sygra asked.

_No. And more dangerous than they look. _

_Isn't everyone?_ _How do you know what they taste like?_

_You don't need to try one. Too much trouble. They'd be after you forever. _

_Oh. Why didn't you say they were fully sentient to begin with?_

_They're at the Conclave._ Rahkesh pointed out.

_Hm. Alright then. Can we get some baby pixies soon? _

_Sure._ Rahkesh said. Sygra had been asking for them lately.

Beings from various species were filing into the seats. Hoof beats pounded in the hallway outside and a stunning palomino centaur entered, followed by a chocolate-brown counterpart. The palomino male all but shimmered and Rahkesh recognized him instantly as Viare, the commander of the guardians of the largest centaur herd. He had had a practice fight with the centaur the previous spring, Viare was no one to mess with and extremely skilled. Rahkesh had taken quite a beating, though Viare had apparently been impressed with his abilities. The centaur female was the color of chocolate and a good deal older, her hair and tail tinged with grey. A faun followed them in, talking animatedly with a third centaur, this one a plain dusty brown male who had an aged venerable look to him, a scars scattered across his hide. Viare glided around to the far side of the semicircle floor, the faun settled between the other two centaurs. Rahkesh felt out magically and caught an Akren signal from the faun. Another of theirs.

A few Vascari and okapi fae took most of the seats in the front row, leaving two empty seats between themselves and four werewolves who had gotten the seats closest to the door. Over two hundred other beings filtered in, taking the remaining seats. A flare of dark and bright red flames and one of the Ateres angels appeared at the back of the room. Probably there to keep an eye on Daray and Silas. Rahkesh didn't know this one, and he knew better than to ask either of his friends, since they might not be allowed to tell him.

When the doors finally closed and the room began to quiet down Mrs. Stocklir appeared from a small door hidden in the wall behind Rahkesh. She took a quick head count and offered them all chairs.

"I suppose we should all be glad that our note to the giants was unanswered, and that the trolls didn't respond either." Mrs. Stocklir said, "Giants are intelligent but I have to tell you I disagree with anyone who calls trolls fully sentient and intelligent. That message was a waste of paper." She turned to Sharahak, who looked like a giant standing next to her diminutive form. Each of his wings was half again as large as all of her body. "How are you holding up?" The little old witch asked Sharahak kindly.

"Very well madam." Sharahak replied easily.

"And you?" She asked the others, eyes on Rahkesh.

"Well enough." Rahkesh said. "I think once we start this will be easier."

"Hmm. Tristan spoke to me earlier. The door behind you has a staircase directly to the roof." Mrs. Stocklir told him quietly.

"Thank you." Rahkesh said.

"Now you all know that the skyeyes will be recoridng everything right?" Mrs. Stocklir asked. They all nodded. "Now most people won't be watching all of this. There's several groups meeting right now and they can't all go out live at once. Too much effort. In fact your speeches will not be broadcast live at all. Some segments may be shown later though. What will be happening is that a few representatives will be speaking to live cameras, summarizing what is happening. However, your presentations will be available to any magical being who wants them."

"So don't screw up." Daray muttered.

"I'm sure you'll do just fine." Mrs. Stocklir said. Rahkesh shifted uneasily. He'd never done anything like this before, and despite the basilisk's radiating confidence and self assurance he was still nervous.

"Who is starting?" Mrs. Stocklir asked.

"I will." Daray said. "Since our going back in time was my fault."

"Silly blood-sucker." Rahkesh muttered. Mrs. Stocklir looked amused.

"I suppose you won't be telling us everything?"

"No. Sorry about that. We promised that we wouldn't lead anyone back to them." Silas said. They had promised the Chachapoyaro that they wouldn't tell everyone in their time where they were. The group had simply agreed to extend the bounds of that promise. That way even the fae truth tellers wouldn't be able to see that they were keeping back extra stuff, because the actual promise did exist.

"That's fine, everyone understands that sort of thing. However you might want to start off mentioning that to everyone so that they know what you can't say and the questions will stay on topic." Mrs. Stocklir advised. "I'll be in the other hall, but my assistant Margaret Stillwater is by the main doors."

"I like her." Silas decided as the elderly witch left the room. "Good idea to have her in charge of this."

"The way she acts you can't tell that we've got all of two months and about three weeks left to live." Sharahak said, sounding more than a little depressed. "Daray? I think they're ready."

"Right." Daray said, turning and moving up to the front of the table, Rahkesh and the others dropped back to the chairs behind him.

"Grandmother wants him to practice giving presentations." Silas muttered to Rahkesh. "Since she uses the younger family members as messengers it's a good skill to have."

"What about you?" Rahkesh asked softly as Daray began explaining to the gathered beings about their trip back in time. It was already very clear that Silas and Daray had very different roles in the Ateres family. Silas was the sort of weapon that Cyala would use very carefully, especially since he didn't "fit in" as well as Daray did. He was dangerous in a way that had to be applied selectively. While Daray would probably be more the Ateres public face, since he was, after all, just about the perfect example of what the perfect magical vampire was supposed to be.

"Eventually. First I have to convince grandmother that my hypnotism won't get away from me whenever I get nervous in front of a crowd." Silas said. "That would cause problems. And she's worried about other vampires trying to get my ability by drinking my blood. There's a way to stop that from happening, grandmothers working on it now. Once that isn't a concern she'll probably start training me too."

"Have your captive demons awakened yet?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes, naturally they chose to wake up this afternoon, when we don't have the time to start questioning them."

"Naturally."

"They're in solitary confinement. Plain white rooms, no furniture, no obvious light source, they can't even see the door. We left them each a small mat with a large unbreakable container of water. Temperature is a little cooler than they find comfortable, but not enough to harm them. Let them stew until around one in the morning. Then Namach is going to start in on his. One at a time and alone. That way we can check their stories against each other. We'll start off with verbal interrogating techniques and not rip their minds apart until after they've told us everything."

"Any chance I could watch?" Rahkesh asked. Daray was explaining the ritual they had observed. From a large pensive on the table images were appearing in the air of the Inca sorcerers and their altar. Some of the representatives were looking ill watching the bloody scene. Sharahak however was watching with interest. The vampires had all been badly affected by the demon magic and so they hadn't actually seen the whole thing when it was happening. Rahkesh was sure the vampire meeting in a few days would spend a lot of time discussing their adverse reactions to demon magic.

"Everyone can watch. We'll record everything and we're planning on bringing them all in on the last few days of the Conclave. All the species are sending in some of their best interrogators so they can have a shot at them too." Silas said.

"I suppose the elves will also want them."

"Most likely. Ask Namach. He's managing everything to do with them. Since they won't listen to anyone else except grandmother and she's a bit busy finding portals."

"I thought the elves were supposed to do that." Rahkesh objected.

"They did."

"And didn't share the results?" Rahkesh asked incredulously.

"Their seers advised against it for our own good." Silas said with a shrug. "For now anyway."

"I don't trust seers." Rahkesh muttered.

"In this case it was straightforward. A perfect fork in the road really. If they told us more bad things would happen then if they didn't. Which is the only reason their Champion listened to the seers. According to Namach he usually doesn't. Except when he's the one making the predictions. In this case his reading and the usual seers happened to align." Silas explained.

Daray had gotten to the point where he and Sharahak had gotten their minds locked with those of the demons. Rahkesh watched as the crowd leaned forward intently. A few of the vampires were glancing over at Sharahak with something like pity. Sharahak was ignoring everyone. Rahkesh checked quickly into the link he and Sharahak had, and found the vampire/demon was remarkably calm, if a little uneasy at being stared at. Rahkesh focused on the link and sent a thought at Sharahak _Maybe you should start performing tricks. _Sharahak's tail twitched a little and Rahkesh could feel him fighting not to laugh. Sure that he was alright Rahkesh closed off the link and let him alone.

Daray finished and stepped back. The representatives were taking notes, but no one asked any questions. They were more interested in recent events.

Rahkesh stood and walked to the front of the table. He switched to the pensieve holding the memories of the events of that summer, at Moody's house and at the Ministry. He supposed he should be nervous, but the basilisk was hissing with immense self-confidence. There was nothing to fear here, and it was ready to take center stage.

Rahkesh let it.

XX

"That went better than I had expected." Rahkesh said as they left the hall. The representatives were talking loudly behind them, with Margaret trying to direct the discussion somewhat. Sharahak had left halfway through, to go see what was happening in the other halls. He'd come back just as Rahkesh was finishing his report, to say that there were territorial disputes going on over how to make the maps of areas removed from the world that might or might not have portals on them.

With Daray and Silas also presenting Rahkesh had only had to give an overview of his fight with the demons at Alastor Moody's house, and again at the British Ministry of Magic. In all it had taken over three hours, since the representatives wanted very detailed memories of what each portal altar looked like and how it functioned. They had also had a lot of questions about how each demon was killed.

For Rahkesh the entire thing had been an exhausting strain. His basilisk-self was not about to sit still and be ignored for hours. It had tugged constantly at his mind, the urge to transform almost impossible to resist. Rahkesh had spent the entire meeting fighting to control himself and keep his magics in check enough so that no one sensed just how close to the edge he was. Now he was looking forward to taking a calming potion and reading about mind magic for a few hours, then transforming later when most everyone was asleep for a midnight swim in the hot springs in snake form. Maybe it would calm the serpent down a little if he could spend some time in that form.

Rahkesh sighted a familiar vampire ahead. Mariah, with her dark curling hair, dark gold skin and oriental style robes. Beside her, dressed in dark gray and dark blue, was Draco Malfoy. Malfoy looked much better than he had when Rahkesh had last seen him that summer. Finally getting over his phobia of vampires and getting some of his self confidence back seemed to have done wonders. He was standing straight and proud as ever, and didn't flinch as another vampire passed by.

"Mariah." Rahkesh greeted the dragon researcher.

"Rahkesh, I was hoping to meet you here." Mariah said. "You're Sharahak aren't you?"

"Correct." Sharahak said, it was awfully hard to mistake him for anyone else.

"Rahkesh has told me about this dragon that you had living with you for a while. Enireth. If you ever have the time I would love an interview about him, for my archives." Mariah said.

_She researches dragons. An old one, have you met before?_ Rahkesh asked Sharahak. Sharahak gave back a no, but said that Namach had already mentioned her.

"That would be fine with me, however I fear that I won't have much free time soon, and what I have the elves seem determined to monopolize." Sharahak said regretfully. "Much as I'd rather be discussing dear Enireth than the demon realm." Mariah laughed.

"I suppose I can't really compete with them. When you have time then." She agreed. She turned towards the hall they had exited, Draco following obediently. There was a gold collar around his neck, but apparently he had gotten used to that to…and gotten a lesson in manners, Rahkesh noted as Draco opened the door for his owner.

"I suppose they want to hear about what he saw of the portal Voldemort had." Daray said.

"Do you suppose it's still functional?" Silas asked.

"If it is he won't use it. They've already betrayed him. He's probably out for revenge." Daray said.

"Nice. Maybe he and demons will off each other." Rahkesh said.

"If only." Silas sighed.

"Are you coming back to Akren?" Rahkesh asked. Silas had been at the Ateres prison with his captive demons since the fight.

"Yes. I have so much work to make up." Silas groaned.

"You have no idea. Someone went and told the professors how little time we have left. They're determined to teach us everything in three months." Rahkesh said.

"Headmistress even started talking over time travel with the rest of the faculty, to get the entire current student body fully trained before the demons invade." Daray warned. "So we can join the army of alumni that the AAA is gathering."

"Not a bad idea at all." Sharahak said.

"Except the logistics of moving so many for so long are almost impossible." Rahkesh replied. "So instead they're teaching us everything they can, so that we might have some chance at fighting back."

"Speaking of fighting back, the fae are convinced that the demons have killed the sirens and are demanding that we start opening portals and attacking into the demon realm somehow." Sharahak said. "When I was in the other hall listening the werewolves were arguing in favor of muggle weapons."

"Anything with a circuit, or that has to be lit on fire before going through, won't make it into the demon realm." Silas said. "After opening that portal in Mexico uncle Norovosi is sure of that."

"Do you think they did really kill the sirens?" Daray said. "It doesn't make much sense. I'd assume demons are immune to their songs and even if they weren't there are only thirty or so sirens at any given time anyway. And only a few of those are capable of using their voice magics. Not much of a threat."

"And not particularly able to defend themselves either." Rahkesh said. "But they could be dangerous because of how well they know the seas around their islands. They might have found something to do with the demons and the sea demons killed them to keep them from telling anyone."

"Yes but could sea demons actually kill the sirens on land?" Daray asked.

"No." Sharahak answered. "They wouldn't be able to reach. They're not much of a threat to anything out of the water."

"We've still got at least five terrestrial demons unaccounted for." Silas reminded them.

"When I stopped in the hall with the military representatives was going on about that. Chaos." Sharahak said. "Absolute chaos. Until Cyala Ateres showed up and burned the seats to ash, sat them all down on the floor and told them to shut up and behave."

"Oh I wish I could have seen that." Daray said.

"It was entertaining. And they did manage to build a search plan. Mrs. Stocklir showed up to help and threatened to kick out anyone who didn't cooperate." Sharahak said. "She's a very bright old lady. Most of the plan was hers."

XX

Rahkesh closed the door to his rooms behind him. Sygra slid off his shoulders and headed for her cage. Slipping in through the open swinging door at the top she wound down one of the branches to the heated stone on the bottom, where she curled up to sleep.

_Tired?_ Rahkesh asked

_Exhausted._ Sygra admitted. Rahkesh picked up a large cloth from beside the cage and covered it over. The fabric blocked out the light and was enchanted against sound.

_I'll be out at the hot springs._ Rahkesh said. Sygra could find her way out there easily enough if she had to.

Daray, Silas and Ally met him in the stables. With them were Rianae, Justin, Haedil, and Justin's sister Ceylia. Rahkesh's parseltongue ability was public knowledge, and while he hadn't checked the Akren records yet he was certain that his basilisk form was listed there – not that it was any sort of secret anyway, since the underground battle in Mexico he could hardly have hoped to keep it a secret. Hopefully that meant they wouldn't mind when he transformed for a soak. Especially if he enchanted the water first so it wouldn't spill out everywhere. Knowing the vampires though, they'd start using him for a diving board.

"How are you feeling?" Ally asked. Rahkesh had told his closest friends everything about what his snake-self was doing, just incase he started acting weird.

"Better. Where were you for the first night of Conclave?" Rahkesh asked. Ally smirked at him.

"If I told you that, I'd have to kill you."

"Secret Agent Woman." Daray said. He was joking but Rahkesh could see the seriousness under it. Ally never told them what she was actually up to when she frequently left the school. She also hadn't told them what all of her classes were. Since everyone had secrets no one had pried any. But Rahkesh had to wonder what Ally was becoming. She had her animagus form completed, but it wasn't in the records and she hadn't said anything to anyone about it. She also had lied outright about her summer activities, making Rahkesh wonder just what she was doing that was so important.

Ally shrugged off Daray's comment with a grin, and a leer. "Does that mean I can handcuff you next time you try to leave frog eggs in my bathtub?"

"Oh you don't need a reason to do that." Silas chimed in, "I'm sure he's always happy to be locked up by beautiful females." They all laughed while Daray growled.

"Sorry darling, only if you're the one wearing the cuffs."

"But I always kick you ass." Ally complained.

"Is that an owl?" Rianae asked loudly before the two could tackle each other to settle the issue.

The group turned to look up and saw an owl winging in towards them. Rahkesh's breath caught as he recognized Hedwig. She settled onto his shoulder, landing as gently as ever, and gave him the note she carried. Rahkesh tucked it away, not about to open it in front of the others.

"I think I probably need to respond to that." He said. "I'll meet you out at the hot springs."

"Pool six." Daray agreed. Rahkesh did not wait to see them ride away on the fire horses. He returned to his rooms immediately. Shutting the door he raised all of the wards and locked them in place.

Sygra, feeling the wards go up, slipped out of her cage and look at him curiously. Seeing Hedwig she crossed to the bed where he was sitting and took his other shoulder, hissing at Hedwig. While his two familiars engaged in a staring contest across his head Rahkesh unfolded the note.

It was Hermione's handwriting, he had known it would be.

_Harry,_

_WHAT DID YOU DO TO US!?_

_I tried to tell mom what you told us and I couldn't talk!_

_WHAT DID YOU DO!?_

_I swear Harry Potter if you put some kind of enchantment on me I'll kill you!_

Rahkesh folded the note and burned it. Ignoring Sygra's questioning hiss of concern at his expressionless face he went and picked up a clean sheet of pale blue parchment. This had been dipped in several potions and washed with several spells. Rahkesh pressed his left palm to it and the surface shimmered like water. Staring directly into it Rahkesh recorded his response.

"_I placed a very specific blood magic enchantment upon everyone at the dinner._

_You wanted information on my life, and I gave it to you. _

_I trust you all to keep silent. However I do not trust your fighting abilities. In order to protect myself I enchanted all of you so that you could not say anything about what I had told you in the presence of anyone who was not at the dinner._

_To tell you as much as I did, to trust you, that is a weakness Hermione. Tell me, do you think you are strong enough to be my weakness? _

_I know you aren't. What would happen if the fae used plant magic to break your mind? What will happen if the vampires drink your blood? What do you think will happen when the werewolves use thread magic to pull the truth out of you? Can you resist all of these? _

_I know you cannot. But I will not lie to you. I can't, I can't lie to people I respect. You've been like a sister to me Hermione and I could not bear having to directly lie to you. Or, rather, I will lie as little as I possibly can (obviously oaths to the Akren Alumni Association come first). I will not flat out lie to you about anything if I can possibly tell the truth. I respect you, you know that, I trust you. But you cannot guard my secrets on your own. _

_So I made a choice. By silencing you I could be truthful. _

_Which would you prefer Hermione? To know nothing of my life? Or to know and not be able to discuss it with anyone who did not share the silencing enchantment? _

_Make your choice Hermione. If you would rather be able to talk freely then I am happy to remove the enchantment, and your memories with it. But until you are strong enough to be my weakness I cannot give you both._

_My apologies about the enchantment, it is necessary that those being enchanted not know about it. Removing it is painless and simple. _

_Please respond soon, _

_Harry_

Rahkesh tapped his wand to the parchment and the surface shimmer again, turning a darker blue. Rahkesh pulled out a pen and write, in enchanted ink _press your palm to the parchment_. Then he rose and went to one of the large old wooden filing cabinets he had built for his room. Inside one was a drawer filled with files, each one containing the name of a friends, or enemy. Pulling out Hermione's he removed a filmy piece of papyrus paper. On it were Hermione's finger prints, taken from her house when he had gone to help her move out of Britain. He pressed this to the blue parchment. Drawing his wand he swept it across the parchment four times, north to south, east to west, south to north, west to east. Then he tapped the center and sent the magic into it. When he peeled them apart the blue parchment had a hand print on it with a copy of Hermione's prints in it's magic.

Rahkesh put the print file away. Then he rolled the blue parchment, tied it closed with a gold ribbon, and placed the end of his wand against it. Focusing on sending magic to the spells keeping his image and words intact Rahkesh added magic. Then he cast spells to seal it against the elements and against anyone other than Hermione opening it. Not that they would have been able to read it anyway.

Apparently his first ever attempt at a bloodmagic based enchantment had worked. Rahkesh couldn't help smiling. Bloodmagic students were required to complete one bloodmagic based enchantment before they really got into necromancy. And there was an entire class on bloodmagic enchantments he was taking during the spring semester, in additon to necromancy. He had until mid winter ot perform some sort of enchantment, but had managed it months early. He'd have to send in a report, one to the Bloodmagic Guild, to be added to his records there, and one for professor Namach. The Guild requested bloodmages-in-training keep them updated. Rahkesh didn't have to inform them of every ritual he did, that would be absurd since most performed special rituals that they didn't want anyone to know about. But he should inform them of certain milestones. This report would just read that he had done a secrecy web, and that it had worked. They would never know on who or what information was being kept secret. Namach was going to be very pleased, while one enchantment was required a secrecy web was more advanced than what was expected. Secrecy webs weren't taught until the actual bloodmagic enchantments class, Rahkesh had done his on his own, and, best of all, Rahkesh had completed his bloodmagic enchantment before Daray.

"Hedwig how about you stay the night. I'll send you off tomorrow with this?" Rahkesh asked. Hedwig hooted her agreement. Rahkesh conjured up a cage for her with a nice perch. He put in a water dish. Next he went to his trunk for some owl treats. They were in a third trunk that stayed in his rooms. It had three locks on it and one of them opened to all of his old Hogwarts things. Here there was a moment of consternation as Rahkesh had to first magically subdue his messed up invisibility cloak as the invisible thing snapped and bit at him. The owl treats were in the bottom and he snatched them out before slamming the trunk shut. Not fast enough; a row of cuts appeared on his arm as the incorrectly enchanted cloak bit him.

Giving Hedwig the treats Rahkesh healed his arm.

_You need to fix that thing before it kills someone._ Sygra told him.

_I've been trying!_ Rahkesh protested. He had been…except it always bit him!

_For almost a year. Ask for help. _

_Hmmm…_

_Are you embarrassed?_

_Yes?_ Rahkesh muttered, Sygra smirked at him.

_You should be. _

_Sygra, you're not helping any. _

_I thought you did need help. _

_Ssssssss!_

_Ha. Now what was that letter about?_

Please Review

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Apologies about the slow update, life gets in the way (and being sick). I hope enough happened in this chapter to make up for it.


	18. Chapter 18

Chaos Babe – I might toss some details in later, or write a side story about that. It's just something I came up with at 3am.

Etidorpha – More about the Conclave here. The Vashora will be explained eventually, they are important.

Onpwis – erm, sorry. Maybe an alternate fic someday. Seems everyone likes that pairing (including me).

Sapientiae – you'll find out about Ally…eventually. If you like that character you'll enjoy this chapter.

Koruyuha – yes the magical world is much smaller.

Jiriaya – not in human form, only in basilisk will the rooster affect him.

Japanese Cowboy – no current beta. Thanks but I don't really like having a beta.

Jencancer5 – Snape will return, fear not!

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Chapter 18

"As you can see nearly half of the spells attempted had next to no effect on the demons here." Rahkesh said. Beside him an image of the fight in the British Ministry played. They had spliced together several people's memories plus one from a Ministry recording device.

The collected beings he was facing did not look happy. In fact they looked really grim. Like they had just been told their world was going to end, which, of course, it was. And he had only a little good news for them in a long string on unhappy reality. The PR team had done an amazing job quelling mass hysteria in all species involved, but it was hard not to be terrified. Rahkesh had been amazed to find that even after the events of the first day of the Conclave had been reported, with all the disappointing realization that they were in "exhaustively deep shit" (Ally's words), no one had completely panicked and gone off and killed themselves. The reporters seemed a bit surprised at the lack of outright panic as well. The PR group had done a good job making it a problem everyone could help solve in an us vs. them way that made people want to fight.

His audience of several hundred was taking notes, though a complete list of all spells so far attempted on demons, plus their success, or lack thereof, was being written up for everyone. Rahkesh expected to spend a lot of time practicing the ones that worked. Except the early report from those doing the write up said that some spells only worked sometimes, and they couldn't find a pattern of how or when the spells succeeded. Probably it depended upon the individual demon's reaction time.

"However most of the physical weapons used were effective, especially those coated with poisons or specific enchantments. As noted earlier bullets and handguns readily available in Britain had no real effect, however it is recognized by all muggles and most magical weapons experts that different types of bullets may have a much greater effect." Rahkesh continued. Apparently the guns most available in his homeland were not the best in the world, especially the bullets. "Specially customized bullets would probably work very well, but I'll leave that to Janice Morine." He said, holding out a hand to Janice, who nodded and took her place on the small platform as Rahkesh moved aside.

She had nothing better to report. Except that the two demons at the Ministry had been killed fairly quickly once trained fighters arrived. The bad news would come later. Rahkesh had heard that the military representatives had come to the unhappy conclusion that even though their best could kill demons pretty easily (so far, and they'd only really seen juveniles) they simply didn't have anywhere near the numbers necessary. The demons had too large an army. And Sharahak hadn't even begun his presentation yet. Nor had the Ateres reported on their captives.

He and several others were trading off a narrative that had started with their fighting the demons and Inca, continued by a few other people Rahkesh had never met who had records of demon fighting, then into the present. Kingsley and Alastor had both spoken about the fight at Mad Eye's house that night, along with Andrew Farov. Tristan Namach had showed up with an image-memory of the demon brought in to fight gladiator in Rome. Rahkesh had gotten up again during the fight at the Ministry, and was now mostly done. There were plenty of others to cover the battle in the Mexican portal/cavern. It was a good thing he was about done. His Basilisk-self wanted exercise.

"You smell snakish." Silas said softly as they left the hall.

"Smells nice." Rahkesh replied, daring either of the vampires to deny that. Naturally Daray pounced at once. Rahkesh could always count on him for that.

"Erm, no. Snakes do not smell nice. Unless they're dead. And cooked." Daray said.

"What?" Rahkesh asked incredulously.

"Like those rattlesnakes they eat in the States." Daray cheerfully explained, deliberately baiting Rahkesh.

"They do?" Rahkesh asked.

_Eww!_ Sygra hissed.

"Yeah. You'd have to ask Ally about it though. Mother mentioned it once." Daray said. Rahkesh highly doubted Ally would know anything about that, but made a mental note to ask anyway.

_If anyone, and I do mean __**anyone**__, ever tries to eat me-_

_Which they won't._ Rahkesh assured his furious familiar. _I'll kill them first. _

_If I knew Ally ate snakes I would have killed her years ago._

_She doesn't. Some others from her country do. _

_I will kill them then. _

Rahkesh was about to try to dissuade her, but his own fury at the idea of eating snakes was making him see red. He tasted venom in his mouth and an urge to hunt down and kill, and eat, anyone who thought snakes tasted good.

"Thunder you're hissing again." Daray said. "If you're not going to translate the curses then don't say them." Rahkesh's head snapped around, eyes glowing.

"Did you have to mention eating snakes to him _now_?" Silas asked plaintively.

"Definitely the wrong time of year." Mad Eye said, stomping up beside them. "Give it a rest Thunder." He grunted at the pissed basilisk-human. "Everything eats everything else."

Rahkesh shook himself out of his red-haze as cracks appeared along one wall beside him.

"Nice." Daray said, admiring the cracked metal and marble work.

"It'll be your face next time." Rahkesh growled at Daray.

"I thought those walls were enchanted against breaking?" Silas asked.

"Probably didn't take parsel-magic into account when building the thread magic and metal-magic wards." Mad Eye said, knocking Rahkesh's knee hard with his walking stick. "Transform in here and your professors will _torture _you."

That threat snapped Rahkesh completely out of it. They would too. They'd see it as a weakness to be corrected. Being out of control for even a week a year was not acceptable. And while they had a point and he'd probably be better off for whatever training they gave him Rahkesh didn't like the idea of being mauled until he learned to stay calm, since that was what it would take.

Daniel and Relora, his pack alpha, had finished their presentations on the demon attacks that had wiped out all of the London werewolf packs. They had been waiting around listening to the other presenters. Now they met the little group as they exited the building, eyeing Rahkesh warily. They knew what he was going through, but for all that Rahkesh was holding in the power flows around him whatever he _was_ giving off was more than it had been previously. His magic _felt_ venomous, almost uncomfortably so against his skin. And the werewolves switched to breathing through their mouths when they got close, he was probably making their sensitive noses hurt.

"Feeling all right?" Daniel asked.

"Yes." Rahkesh hissed.

"The baskbirdman is just PMSing." Daray said gently behind Rahkesh's back. Rahkesh whirled, hissing, lightning flying from his fingertips. Daray leaped up one carved wall as the marble was blasted to ash below where he had been standing.

"Enough!" Elara Ateres dropped from the sky, black and red flaming wings ripping her son off the wall and hurling him to the ground. Her claws leaving gashes along his arms. Dropping down in front of Rahkesh she cast a shielding spell and waited, glaring.

Rahkesh hissed softly, reigning in the urge to fight/conquer/kill/maim. He did not want to tangle with a dark angel. He'd seen them go through demons like a sword through warm butter and he really didn't need any more injuries. Elara apparently got the message, since she spun around and struck Daray across the head as he got up.

"This is supposed to be a peaceful assembly!" Elara snarled, fangs flashing. "Either quit inviting that basilisk to attack you or I'll sew your mouth shut!" Daray's eyes widened and he winced.

"But it's so much fun." He wilted quickly as flames erupted from Elara's wings, '"oh fine." Elara just snarled, and, shaking her head, took to the air again.

The two werewolves, who had back off a ways, rejoined them watching Elara fly off. Mad Eye reappeared a moment later, glaring at Rahkesh, who glared back with a glow in his eyes that kept the old auror from saying anything. Mad Eye shook his grizzled head instead, looking just a bit amused at the display. Rahkesh pulled in the magic, immersing himself in the basilisk and relaxing, absorbing the magic and letting it flow through him until it stabilized a little.

"I am never going to let you live this down." Silas warned his cousin as they went to the portkey site.

"Live what down?"

"Your mother having the rescue you from a pissed off snakemanbird." Silas replied smugly.

Behind their backs the adult rolled their eyes at each other.

XX

"I don't suppose we should help them?" Rahkesh asked, leaning over the bank, Sygra curling over his head to look down past him. Below five other students were struggling out of the mudslide. Coated head to toe in thick mud, with bits of leaves and other plant parts sticking out everywhere, they looked a bit like they had just crawled out of a brown/gray tar pit.

"No." Rianae vetoed the idea. "We'd just wind up down there with them."

"And here I thought Justin was your boyfriend." Rahkesh teased, "I see how far that loyalty goes." The fae student in question was almost unrecognizable. If Rahkesh hadn't known who the five were already he would never have been able to figure it out from their present appearance.

"Oh I'll be happy to help him clean up afterwards. Maybe a long cozy bubble bath in front of a fire." Rianae said, tossing her dark hair with a smirk "but I don't feel like being tossed in a mud pit by a bunch of pissy elves." She picked up some purple threads from the small bag attached to her belt and tied a few knots. As she tied a stairway slowly formed out of the rocky ravine wall. Threadmagic might not be the fastest magic around, but it was very useful. The rocks moved and slowly bent into the shape she was creating. Rahkesh was tempted to ask about the thread type, but didn't distract her. He couldn't do it anyway. And while he knew he was plenty good at many things the fact that he simply _could not_ do threadmagic really made him envious.

One of the Elven Captains had come to Akren to see the most recent demon bodies stored in their labs – the ones from the fight at the British Ministry. Apparently Ferraidar had thought it amusing to send along a score or so of young elves to keep their elders company. So while the actual elven patrol was stationed around the mountains watching for signs of demons (who might come to attack the elves just because they felt like it) the pack of young elves had been told that they had to stay behind to learn more about earthlings and to get some real Earth experience (as opposed to all those other planets?). This did not make them happy. These elves were very young, and, in the way of all young beings, thought far too much of themselves.

Rahkesh supposed that the entire purpose of sending them had been to teach them that they weren't yet well-trained enough to take such a superior attitude. But he wished the Ferraidar could have found a different way to go about teaching the youngsters a little humility. Young they might be but they were still elves. The Akren staff had pounced on the training opportunity and the fighting (aka "friendly sparring") had started almost as soon as the older elves had left, and the Akren students, while not exactly loosing, were having a hard time holding their ground.

"I'm surprised they're not being attacked." Rahkesh said

"Yes that is just a little odd. I wonder what the elves are planning? That they would let such an opportunity pass." Benjamin said. "Probably laughing over the mess that team is. Elves don't get dirty do they?"

"Justin's an Okata anyway. This ought to seem pretty routine." Ally added, watching as the vampire, Mara, dodged to avoid a lump of mud flung her way by the elves on the other side of the ravine. Mara, they all agreed, must be wearing some sort of powerful spell. She was bruised up a bit but the mud had all fallen off and so she could move with greater ease then the mud-laden, sopping wet, miserable students behind her. The elves must have spelled the stuff to be extra hard to get rid of, as no cleaning spells had worked.

"Just because the Okata live in caves doesn't mean they're always filthy." Rianae protested.

"If we can stop discussing Rianae's pet fae – there're elves headed our direction." Silas said. Nuri's head was up and he staring at a set of trees across the ravine, like a dog on point.

The Akren students turned to look. The elves quickly ducked out of sight.

"Five?" Daray asked.

"Sygra says more than nine." Rahkesh replied. His familiar's senses were very helpful.

"Eleven." Xayi, alpha of one of Akren's werewolf packs, said after consulting with her werewolves. "Stop growling Matolo," she added to her beta, "that'll just help them find your exact location."

"How many do we have here who are good at threadmagic?" Rahkesh asked, an idea of a plan forming. Several hands went up. They had sixty Akren students here, though none of the oldest – they were off practicing against Viare's best centaurs in a mock war-game to learn rapid tactics – the young elves might actually be a better deal. Given Rahkesh's last fight with the centaur Guardian had been pretty bruising, and the centaur hadn't really been trying to hurt him.

So far they had managed to avoid any close-contact fights, where the vastly superior elven strength would overpower even the strongest of the earthlings. The Akren students not out fighting were in class since professors Strawlime and Yetran wouldn't hear of cancelling class just because of a pack of elves running around. Professors Marluck, Marluck, and Ahmad were on the mountainside of Akren, watching and placing bets with a few older elves.

"How about you tear the elves out of the trees." Rahkesh suggested. "Any good fliers here?" Again he got several hands. "We'll attack once they're in the open. The rest of you need to find the rest of the elves before they get around behind us."

The students split, Rahkesh stopped briefly to remove his broom from a trunk while the others summoned theirs. Rianae, easily the best with threadmagic they had on their team, led her group back a ways and slipped up onto some higher ground in denser trees. An area with plenty of large rocky outcroppings and an old field behind them to go back into if the elves crossed the ravine. Better to have a field at their backs than a forest where the elves would be almost unstoppable.

Their current situation was the result of a fairly clever idea of Haedil's to draw the elves out of the old forest they had originally taken over. They had had no chance at all once the elves started moving the trees around and enchanting tree roots and branches to attack them. The five currently struggling out of the ravine had gone in to draw the elves to the edge of the ravine, where they would be easier targets. The tactic seemed to have worked, they had laid traps at the ravine's edge and ten had been triggered, meaning someone had probably gotten hurt or knocked out. There were at least eleven near the ravine's edge, probably preparing their own attack. But there were still at least a dozen or so elves unaccounted for (it didn't help that they didn't know how many elves there had been to start with). Rahkesh _thought_ that they had the elves out numbered about two to one, but he wasn't sure. The sides might actually be even.

Even if they did have the elves outnumbered the initial skirmishes had been brutal. Rahkesh was sporting ugly dark bruises across his ribs. The bones had been snapped bad enough to form compound fractures. Fortunately they had been healable. He'd never had breaks that bad before. He was never going to forget the feeling of being hit and having the fist actually go _into_ him, as if his flesh was tissue paper. Rianae and Benjamin had healed him while Daray distracted the two elves.

Silas had gotten one arm so badly broken that it had taken three of their best to heal him. Nuri had wound up with a (thankfully minor) skull fracture from being smacked across the head.

The elven speed had also out-done all the lion fae, as they had been taken down as easily as they would kill a three-legged zebra, by a single elf. Being lions they had been attempting to stalk some of the elves. But one elf had been stalking them, and managed to knock them all out cold with blows to the neck while not taking a single bruise or scratch from the lion's claws. Rahkesh and Mara had gotten the task of awakening the furious lions, amid much roaring and snarling.

While the other team was coordinating their threadmagic Rahkesh and his team moved to the edge of the ravine, keeping low under some dense shrubs. The small black communicators they each wore on their ears (created by Ally) allowed them to speak between teams. Daray sent a question and got a response that they would have a few minutes to wait.

Rahkesh, kneeling behind some high grasses at the ravine's edge, relaxed and rubbed his aching head. The thunderbird was being insistent in a way it hadn't been since he'd first transformed. It wanted freedom, to spread its power and use the magic. Rahkesh groaned, recognizing his animagus's desires as a reflection of his own wish to be elsewhere right now. It tended to manifest that way. He would want something and the thunderbird would react along the same lines, only with a violent interpretation. He wanted to get back to the school. To destroy the opponent and leave - preferably to go and spend the day curled up in a comfy armchair with one of his mind magic texts. Or maybe corresponding with various people, and/or governments, and/or reporters, who wanted questions answered about parseltongue. Strangely enough Rahkesh rather liked being a "renowned expert" on his own magic. And as the only available (obviously Harry potter wasn't) human who had helped in writing the now-famous guide he was the one other humans were mostly likely to trust. There was rain coming, no big storm, just cold rain, and he didn't want to be out in it.

"I don't think the Headmistress would appreciate it if you went and scorched half the valley." Daray said. The vampire was as being disturbingly perceptive, Rahkesh thought, until he noticed the tiny ripples of electricity crackling silently over his fingers much like the tiny storms that raged inside each of his animagus feathers. But his hands were in front of him and Daray behind and to the side, so perhaps he was just that perceptive.

"Not to mention the professors watching this. They did restrict our use of animgus forms."

"Didn't do that to the elves." Daray muttered.

"I don't know if elves have animal forms apart from those crazy death dragons." Rahkesh said.

"Did they mention anything about snake forms?" Daray said with a grim chuckle.

"No. I'm good for now though. A night in the hotsprings in snake form helped a lot."

"Just crazy-aggressive right?"

"Yeah." Rahkesh said, admitting a little that he'd been ready to kill all day and was not at all convinced he wouldn't try if he got into a real fight. Would it upset the Elven Commanders unduly if he killed one of their youngest students? Probably. They'd probably wipe out all humans in retaliation. He'd have to stay away from any close in fighting that developed.

"Probably for the best if you don't transform. One of them might get clever and transfigure a rooster." Daray mused, snickering when Rahkesh groaned.

"Only _real_ roosters work." He replied. "Conjured ones have no effect. They didn't say anything about not using your animgus's _magics._" Rahkesh said. "Therefore I _can_ go and zap the elflings out of their trees.

"If the trees let you. I swear the elves have gone a melded with them." Daray said. There was a rustle in the underbrush and all three lionesses appeared. Rahkesh's features twisted into a grimace as Esi, in hominid form, thankfully, crouched beside him and traced a finger over a cut on his shoulder. Rahkesh turned his head to look at her suspiciously. Esi grinned and dragged her nails across his chest. The basilisk hissed pleasantly at the recognition, Rahkesh resisted the urge to swat her. He did not want to deal with their games. Unknowingly his skin developed a very faint scale pattern with even fainter lightning under it. Esi let go of his shoulder and settled beside him instead.

Adila sidled up to Daray and leaned against him, rubbing her thigh against his. Daray turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow and smile.

"After we teach the elflings not to mess with earth-based life forms we are going to have to get together for a little…tactical chat." Adila purred at him sweetly. Rahkesh snorted out his nose and leaned away from Esi.

"The three of you are worse than a pack of succubi." He complained. "One has to look for an ulterior motive."

"You are such a curmudgeon." Esi sighed. "We don't need an ulterior motive."

"No you certainly don't." Daray smirked broadly, twisting around to look at her. He lowered his eyelids and dropped his voice to a low husk.

"Especially with you handsome." Chenzira added, pressing up against Daray's back and leaning over his shoulder. "Those pearly fangs are just so…intriguing."

"You, beauty, can lick my fangs any day."

"I don't want a tongue piercing."

"It's more about getting to watch our virile lion stud get all jealous and growly." Adila finished with a deep purr. The three females retreated a bit, with Esi pinching Daray's ass as she did. "The lion fae are interested in contracting your clan to scan one of our territories for portals. The elves spent an unusually long time there and we are suspicious that they may have been trying to tell us something – without earning their High Council's disapproval.

"I am beginning to see why Ferraidar and his lieutenants routinely challenge the Council to cursing contests and kickboxing fights." Rahkesh sighed. "Any chance to give them a good beating, I bet the general elven population finds it all hilariously funny."

"They probably do. What do they care about what happens here?" Daray said. "I'll pass your note along, without the groping part."

"Vampy sounds neglected." Chenzira said. Daray's head snapped up and he glared furiously, magic glowing at his fingertips.

"Fengyang at 2 o'clock." Adila hissed softly.

"Hmmm, I'm guessing watching you feeling my ass didn't sit well with him." Daray said.

"But it is such a nice ass." Esi said with an overly dramatic regretful sigh.

"Some other time darling." Chenzira said.

"When Fengyang figures out that he's better off just playing along." Daray agreed.

"Ooooh. Now that _is_ an idea." Esi said.

"Help." Rahkesh said, "I'm surrounded by hormonal sex addicts."

"And _you_ Thunder are welcome to come along." Adila added over her shoulder.

"Ha!" Rahkesh laughed. "tell me, do lion fae always begin business deals by molesting their business partners?"

"Cute. Real cute." Chenzira said. The three stalked off, picking up Fengyang, who, after glaring at his little pride, rolled his eyes at Daray and Rahkesh in a fairly helpless manner. The lion fae moved off after the third group of students to go find the missing elves. Ally was leading them, being easily better than just about anyone at that sort of thing, especially once the fight started. She had her team spread out, but in groups which were in visual contact. Each group moved so that no one was ever last in line, they always had someone beside them, harder to pick off. Rahkesh watched them leave then turned back to Daray.

"It was just a question I don't - DOWN!"

Everyone hit the ground as fireballs streaked overhead like comets. Rahkesh brought up a shield the fireballs smashed into the glowing blue covering the hillside. Then Rahkesh sensed threadmagic. Someone took control of the fireballs and hurled them right back across the ravine.

"I guess they're ready." Daray said, "open a space?"

"Emergency landing." Rahkesh agreed. "Oh and Daray?" The vampire turned to look at him. "That was the cheesiest line I've ever heard. "_Lick my fangs_?" You need to have your tongue removed for criminal cliche-ness." Rahkesh sneered. With the slightly pink and silent vampire glaring he opened their communicators "anyone near the rock pile open a space in the trees in case we have to hit the ground fast."

"Done." Hanashi said back.

Rahkesh leaped onto his broom and tumbled off the edge of the ravine, twenty other students following. Glancing back Rahkesh could see the threadmagic team, including a glowing Rianae, twisting and knotting threads.

Elves came flying out of the trees as the whole side of the ravine shuddered. Fighting the air, and the invisible magic ropes, the distracted elves were easy targets. Rahkesh dove deep into the ravine, skimming just over the mudslide. Drawing his wand he began casting contortion curses and blinding spells, followed by concussion spells with seeking magic attached, to ensure they found their targets. Rahkesh dodged blue lights. Trees on the ravine bottom lurched and surged upwards. Rahkesh jerked up, reminded strongly of the Whomping Willow at Hogwarts.

Lichens detached from the rocks and flew at him. Rahkesh flattened against his broom and used a tactic that worked pretty well against bludgers, he clamped on and spun. Spinning fast nothing could get a sense of his position.

Behind other students, not so Quidditch-trained, found the tiny lichens eating their flesh as elven magic gave them a capability the tiny life forms hadn't had before.

The team turned at the end of the ravine and flew back. Six students had dropped into the ravine, joining the five down there. As elves came crashing down they stunned and bound them

"There're over-riding the threadmagic!" Someone warned over the communicators. Rahkesh looked up. The last of the elves struggling in mid air seemed to spasm, then _jump_ from thin air, onto the far ravine edge.

Red light flashed and Rahkesh's arm went numb. He called on his bloodmagic to get around it, and felt the elven magic ignore that. Swearing he fired off confusion spells and a series of fast shock-inducing curses before drawing a knife and leaning over. Dodging flying spells at high speed meant he couldn't look away, but he found the correct runes anyway, going by feel, and cut lightly. His bloodmagic flared and threw off the elven spell.

Suddenly the air around him compressed, Rahkesh's breath flew out of his lungs. He imagined a shield and pulled on his bloodmagic to keep his ribs from snapping as the pressure increased. Diving he sought out a rocky outcropping and swerved in close, the edge of his sleeve tearing on the rock. The pressure vanished, wiped off onto the rocks, which fell off the ravine edge.

"Got one!" Rianae called. Rahkesh fired blasting spells at the ground below the elves feet, then turned to see Rianae, twisting thread so fast her hands blurred, and one elf spinning like a toy top in mid air.

"They're flying!" Daray's warning came over the communicators. Some instinct made Rahkesh duck. Two elves flew over his head. No brooms, no wings, just two being flying through the air. Turning they came back. Rahkesh swung his broom around as the first elf tackled him. The broom handle smashed his face. Rahkesh's fist hit his throat.

The second elf got behind him and grabbed Rahkesh in a choke hold. Sygra bit, hard, and the elf cried out in pain, dropping away. Sygra's knock-out venom ensuring he wouldn't be back anytime soon. Another elf hit Rahkesh hard from the side. Rahkesh's eyes lured in pain as something grated along a rib. He knocked the knife from the elf's hand. Dropping his broom and holding it with his knees Rahkesh grabbed the arm, wrapped it over his shoulder, and leaned forward. The broom spun straight down and the elf went flying over his head. Rahkesh twisted as he went and heard a gasp. He hadn't broken the wrist – elven bones were too strong – but that would hurt.

Everything went quiet. Slowly the fliers looked around. The elves had vanished. The air was clear and there was no sign of anyone other than them.

"Oh I _hate_ it when they do that." Haedil muttered. The fae's face had a slash across his chin, but the blood on the elegant black and silver razor-touched nunchucks he was carrying wasn't his – it glowed.

"Anyone down?" Rahkesh asked.

"Benjamin and Eric." Xayi reported. Two werewolves down. That seemed unusual. Maybe the elves could sense them better? Matolo and Justin were seeing to the two, neither of whom appeared conscious. "Not sure what they did but both have broken bones that we can fix, however we can't seem to wake them up."

Because they were fighting outsiders the Akren students were looking after each other very carefully. It was fine for them to kill each other. But for an outsider, an _alien_ no less, to permanently damage one of Akren's was completely unacceptable. While they would accept contracts to kill each other even the Akren alumni assassins would give each other more than decent warning about a non-Akren assassin after one of them. Similarly the rivalry between the two student werewolf packs had been put aside for the day while they fought a non-Akren opponent. Matolo might be from Xayi's pack, but he would look after Benjamin (from Hal's pack) just as well as he did Eric.

Rahkesh began casting healing spells. He was no healer and had no plans to become a mediwizard, but he could heal most broken bones, bruises, and deep knife wounds very well. He could also manage burns (acid and fire), frostbite, and some organ damage. His healing class had improved his abilities greatly. Being able to perform a spell was easier if you knew the components that went into what the magic was actually _doing._ Knowing how bones grew, their parts, and how different tissue types work had improved the quality and range of his magic, even if he wasn't consciously thinking about it when he was casting the spells. His subconscious knowledge enhanced the magic.

His side wound was not bad; the elves weren't allowed to kill. Though the Akren defense probably wouldn't kill them if they did, it was designed for Earth life-forms, not elves. They could probably survive it, barely, maybe. It might be interesting to activate the "no-kill" magics just to try though. The knife had hit a rib, but hadn't broken it. The elf had pulled the blow.

"Third unit, where are you?" Mara asked.

"Somewhere. Do you get the feeling they can hear our communications?" Ally's voice came back. "North of pool six."

North of the sixth hot spring – sixth being relative to its distance from the front doors of the school. There was an old forest there, and an adjoining field that dropped down a steep slope to the outflow stream from pools five and six. Ally was right though, the elves could probably hear them. With their fine senses they could probably hear them talking without having the tap into the magic. It would not have surprised Rahkesh to find them doing that, too. Those elf senses, he realized, were probably what made Ally keep her teams in visual rather than audio contact.

"Why there?" Mara asked.

"A hunch." Silas grumbled. Daray nudged Mara and rolled his eyes, he was whispering under a concealment spell. Rahkesh guessed he was pointing out that the third group wouldn't _be_ there if they didn't have some sort of reason to believe the elves were there. And they weren't saying because the communications weren't secure. If the elves were near the sixth hot spring then some of them had already gotten past the Akren students. So those on the ground had elves on at least two sides.

"We'll fly over." Rahkesh said. Turning the group automatically spread out and dropped to just above the trees. It didn't matter if the elves heard, they'd see them moving son enough.

"Weave." Daray said. The group coordinated and began weaving around between each other, never staying in formation.

"You realize they can tell where we're going before we move." Rahkesh said, not caring if the elves heard. It was damn hard to fight a species with such precognitive abilities.

Something touched the edge of his mind, Rahkesh reacted instantly with a vicious jab and a forceful push of cruciatus-memory. Up ahead something moved. Rahkesh went down and above, three other students following him down. Getting in close Rahkesh jumped from his broom, rolling as he hit the ground.

Beside him two werewolves landed and leaped forward, tackling the staggering elf. Rahkesh hit him over the back of the neck. The third student, a mortal one year above Rahkesh named Raymond, sank into a crouch, fixed on a flicker of movement to their left.

Shouts and a ringing battle cry.

"Twenty two elves accounted for." Rianae snarled as the threadmagic team turned to face the attacking pack of elves. Rahkesh leaped onto a rock and glanced through the trees to see the group in a ring, backs to each other, fingers flying. Elves wielding a variety of weapons were attacking, but the weapons kept flipping around on them. Some of the elves were conjuring, making the ground shake and the air shift. They were altering the chemical make-up of the air. The threadmagic team countered, turning the weird gray gaseous masses around and doing a little transfiguration themselves. Some drew wands, holding them with a few fingers while they worked the threads. Stopping at intervals to switch threads and cast spells. They had to keep the elves from getting close enough to use any weapons.

Fire nets splashed across the elves as Rianae set some threads on fire. Next came pieces of skin flying off the elves' bodies, yanked by threads. Two elves fell, choking on invisible nooses. They broke the magic and used wandless hand motions to snap the threads the team was using. Other elves opened giant holes under the team's feet, students dropping down and vanishing into pits. Still others knocked the Akren team unconscious by meeting their eyes and doing some mind-magic thing.

"Archers." Raymond snapped, pulling the rest to the ground. Rahkesh dropped as arrows flew past. Silently, no sound of air moving or bowstrings, they must be enchanted.

"Six." One of the werewolves snarled out. She began created excellent invisible shields. Rahkesh located the elves a little bit above them on the hill.

"Blast the hill below, then knock them down?"

"Sure."

The spells cast were invisible, no light giving away their presence. But the hillside just below the elves blew out as though from a landmine. Raymond and Rahkesh _pulled_ on the air behind the elves with a solidifying spell and summoning spells. The elves were knocked flat.

Tree branches snaked around Rahkesh's neck, cutting off his air. He cast a de-amination spell and then froze the surrounding forest while the werewolves and Raymond hurled nets of barbed wire over the elves, followed by several vials of potion which created sleeping gasses when broken. Nets of fire followed then a rain of throwing stars coated in motion-slowing poisons. Finally they approached to bind the elves. Rahkesh turned to watch the surrounding forest, healing his badly bruised neck with bloodmagic.

It was because he was facing the thread magic team that Rahkesh saw the wild flash of magic. Had he been facing the other way he would never have seen it in time.

White light lit the sky like a bomb blast. "Duck!" Rahkesh yelled, throwing himself face down and casting a shield spell. Fighting at Akren he had learned fast to create an impressive shield without much warning.

The shockwave hit, spinning Rahkesh around on the ground, ripping his arms on rough tree roots. Everything went white. Rahkesh pressed his face to the ground as the light seared through his closed eyelids painfully. Cries of pain from all around and an agonized sound from nearby told him some others had not reacted fast enough.

Flames, heat, and a wave of rippling magic. The light vanished, Rahkesh leaped to his feet, wand out. Someone was screaming, horrible, horrible, screams.

"Watch them!" Rahkesh gasped out to the other three, pointing to the downed elves. They nodded as Rahkesh dashed off, pushing tree branches aside, towards the source of the screaming.

The trees gave way to open field. The ground blackened and smoking. Bodies lay strewn everywhere, none moving. Fury welled in Rahkesh as he hurtled down the slope towards a single standing figure, wrapped in magic. Basilisk magic raged and the hiss and tang of venom in his magic swirled violently.

It was an elf, bleeding heavily from wounds across both arms. White magic thrashed around him, lashing out to a shrieking figure on the ground. Rahkesh caught the Akren signal from the other student. What the hell was this elf doing?

Others appeared now, following him out of the forest. Elves and Akren students charging down the hill. Rahkesh didn't wait for a full fight to start. The white magic burned brighter, eating at the burning bleeding flesh of the student on the ground. The student wasn't screaming anymore, but the elf showed no sign of stopping. Rahkesh changing his angle, lowered a shoulder, and drove off both feet.

His shoulder impacted the elf in the lower back, bending him in half the wrong way as Rahkesh's' full body weight hit. Rahkesh felt a weird jerk in his shoulder and bright pain then they were both on the ground. Rahkesh rolled smoothly, training taking over as his knives came out and he spun on the ground, not wasting time getting up, and drove both knives into the elf's neck.

Purple light ripped into him and Rahkesh screamed involuntarily as flesh split, ripping from his side. He tore the spell off and countered with skull-fracturing curses.

Then all was chaos as the elves and Akren students attacked each other, friendly sparring forgotten. Blood flew through the air, splashing across the hissing burned ground. The hillside dissolved under curses and the ground shook. Curses and screams rent the air alongside cracking bones.

Rolling over Rahkesh felt a presence and turned around. A top the hill more figures appeared. Akren professors and the elven patrol. One raised their hands and magic flew. Rahkesh ducked low as spells flashing like fireworks shot down the hill at unbelievable speed, splitting apart and catching each elf and Akren student solidly in the head.

The entire field froze as the combined power of the teachers and elves washed over them, weapons and wands falling from stunned hands. Their magic and bodies locked in place by the spell no one moved, watching the descending group. At the front professor Marluck (the female one) waved a hand, bodily dragging every student and elf into a group before their furious elders. The other Marluck went to the still forms covering the ground and began waking them and checking for damage.

"Someone explain what the HELL is going on here?" Professor Ahmad barked. There was silence from the students, who were all glaring at the opposing group.

Rahkesh, realizing he was the only student there not under the control of whatever spell it was, slowly stood. His shoulder hurting horribly. The basilisk surged and his magic roared, Rahkesh pulled it in. The snake wanted to fight the invaders, to kill, to destroy. To use its lethal gaze, deadly venom and massive fangs. To rip the guts out of the elves and eat them, raw and screaming. To throw blood across the field until the earth turned to red mud with it. The group turned to look at him, all of them radiating menace. Thinking fast Rahkesh slammed the basilisk aside and cast a memory spell then raised it into full visual form, replaying the last few minutes in the air for everyone to see.

The Akren professors spun to face their elf counterparts. Who as one had turned on the elf Rahkesh had stabbed – he was now up and healed. He glared back defiantly, one of his friends standing beside him and glaring at the mortals, backing him. One of the Marlucks released the spell on them. The elves shook it off and slowly put away their weapons.

"It is not our fault that these weaklings cannot fight." The one Rahkesh had knocked down said. Rahkesh snorted, right, and the human had just knocked him flat almost severed his head – who was he saying couldn't fight? The basilisk hissed, _it_ could certainly fight, put a fang right through the arrogant bastard's _skull_.

"What part of "NO KILLING OR MAIMING do you not understand?" One of the older elves snapped.

"We were teaching the stupid mortal to surrender to a superior!" The other elf called out.

"Forget the mortals. Since when did friendly sparring and killing overlap?" The older elf was just about hissing, and glowing steadily. But the two young elves didn't want to back down.

"It's not like it matters. It was just a human." One of them said. The older elves paused, then one of them twisted around and raised an eyebrow at the two (fully human) Marlucks. The duo grinned, canine teeth growing.

The two elflings began backing up, then turned, and ran.

Rahkesh took off before the elves had fully turned around. Knowing instinctively they were about to make a run for it he was off even before the two Marlucks had started to transform into their Cerberus animagi. Rahkesh was very fast, and leftover from a childhood of fleeing everyone. But the elves were faster. Faster than anything Rahkesh had ever seen, leaving him behind easily they almost flew up the slope.

Near the tree line a figure dashed across the hill, running on a line to intercept. Rahkesh used his bloodmagic to move faster, and, squinting, realized that it was Ally. She had somehow missed being frozen with everyone else, and the elves hadn't seen her yet. Rahkesh strained and changed his direction. Elves could sense their surroundings surely – yes! They had sensed him and changed their course. Turning them away from the thick forest and towards a rocky cave-riddled slope with patches of old evergreens.

The two elves vanished around a bend in the trail. Rahkesh barreled after them, seeing no sign of Ally but knowing she and the others would be somewhere about. The elves didn't know the trails. Rahkesh drew his wands and hurled a blasting spell at the rocks above the next bend. The elves dodged frantically as the hillside collapsed into a rockslide. They changed direction, going back. Rahkesh watched as both disappeared into a cave in the hillside. Then he followed.

Rahkesh crashed through the branches of the dead pine at the entrance and skidded inside, facing both elves. Without stopping he blindly launched himself at the closest one. Startling him enough to bypass the elven reflexes knock him flat. Rahkesh slammed an elbow into his neck and his fist into the lower spine. Lightning exploded from his hand tearing a shriek of pain from the elf's throat.

The other elf came at him with a long curving sword. Rahkesh ducked and rolled across the floor. Coming in under the elf he slammed a foot up into his groin, almost lifting him off his feet. The elf collapsed against a wall with a strangled cry, Rahkesh pulled out his throwing stars and put a poisoned one into each leg, in the fleshy upper thigh.

As the first elf leaped to his feet, Rahkesh staggered upright and began throwing curses. The elf blocked or redirected them. Rahkesh broke the shield and sent a spell to rip teeth out. Spells flying from his wand silently Rahkesh attacked both elves.

Pain lanced through his right arm, Rahkesh switched his wand to his left and spun around. As the two elves drew weapons to attack five forms came flying in the cave entrance.

Both young elves went smashing back into the walls, blood splattering everywhere. Rahkesh's heartbeat stopped under a magical command. Rahkesh went still, and it let go. Rahkesh paused, staring as two elves and professors Marluck, Marluck, and Ahmad blocked the entrance.

The three students froze. Rahkesh reeling from the power lashing off the five. He slowly drew in his magical senses and this occlumency walls slammed shut. Blocking out his mind and releasing his bloodmagic back to its dormant state Rahkesh lowered his wand, and pulled the knife (which appeared unpoisoned) out of his arm. It hurt, but only a little. It would _really_ hurt once the adrenaline wore off.

A sudden snap of magic and dark power raced across the cave, followed by equally bright, but opposite, lighter power. Both magics roared with anger. Tristan Namach and the Elven Commander had arrived. One look at the face of the Elf Commander and Rahkesh knew this would not end well for anyone. White and gold armor laced with dark green bloodmetal flashed, trying to contain the furious magic flying off of the elf as he strode up to his two errant students.

"Explain." The Commander hissed at one of the elflings, armor bristling and glowing, yellow eyes starting to shine. His voice low and lethal, making Rahkesh's' stomach roll from the threat in it. The young elf trembled, stopped breathing under the wash of magic, and went almost translucent with fear. But did not respond. Snarling Professor Namach moved towards the elf who Rahkesh had tackled and stabbed earlier.

As he moved another person came flying into the room. Without pausing for any of the professors or elf warriors Ally attacked the elf who'd been intent on killing a fellow Akren student earlier.

With a blood-chilling war cry Ally's knives leaped from her hands into his stomach, followed by a fireball. Then Ally struck out. The scream made Rahkesh flinch and clamp his hands over his ears. Ally jerked back, in each hand she held one of the elves eyes.

"Puss filled wart on a whore's ass!" Ally roared at the screaming, blinded elf. She spun and kicked. The elf's head snapped around with a cracking noise and he crumpled to the floor. Ally whirled towards the other elf, fire whips springing from her enchanted blades.

At the door someone began to applaud. Ally twisted, ready to attack and stopped almost in mid air at the sight of the seven standing in the doorway. It was Marluck and Marluck who were applauding, both grinning ear to ear. Ahmad was fixed on the remaining elfling, a bloodthirsty gleam in his eyes. The three elves glanced at each other and shrugged. Their postures relaxed and grins began to show.

"Beautiful performance." The elf Commander said softly, but clearly heard over the screaming and sobbing of the thrashing blinded elf on the floor. He was smiling openly at Ally. Who went a little pink.

"Hm. Inspiringly vicious." Namach agreed, his eyes moving from Ally over to the remaining young elf. Who froze as the cold silver eyes fixed on him.

"While I might be inclined to allow a similar performance with him, I think he's figuring out right about now that he is not a match for her." The Commander said gently to Namach. Who just about pouted in disappointment. Ally actually growled.

"Please?" She asked her knives back in her hands. The professors laughed.

The elf Commander shook his head then glanced over his shoulder outside. "I suppose we had best get back there before they start again."

"They're frozen solid, the lot of them." Namach said. "I think I overdid the spell. Might take a while to remove it." Rahkesh blinked and realized that he meant it literally. The ancient vampire looked around and shrugged, magic flooded the room and Rahkesh closed his eyes at the bright gold light.

Seconds later he was standing on the field again. Ally beside him. The elf who's eyes she had ripped out was curled up on the ground, crying.

"Oh stop your whining, sad little wretch." The elf Commander growled at him. "You know perfectly well that they'll grow back in six months. Get over it."

Ahmad turned a laugh into a coughing fit behind them.

"I believe this means that the lot of them are going back to basic training." One of the elf warriors said.

"Naturally. Can't have warriors so slow a mortal could get past them like that." The Commander agreed. "You'll be lucky if you're let out on patrol again in a century – no make that _two_ centuries. And five decades at one of the Earth bases." He warned the younger elves, who looked like they'd taken a collective kick to the guts at this news. The older elves smirked nastily. Rahkesh was a little surprised. His previous encounters with the elves had rather led him to believe that they would have approved of the younger ones trying to kill humans. Apparently not. Now why was that?

Namach had finished getting the others back to normal. Earthlings and elves alike were groaning in pain from having their joints welded solid to stop movement. Rahkesh made a note to ask about that spell, and about the different attitudes of the younger and warriors and the veterans, at another time.

The elf Commander sent his patrol home at once, the younger elves disarmed and apparently collectively under guard by the older ones, some of whom looked angry enough that Rahkesh _almost_ had to pity them. Almost.

"Is the Council going to throw a hissy fit?" Namach asked, as Ally meticulously cleaned her fingernails of all eyeball-matter.

"Not likely. They'll probably toss his sorry ass back into reflexive training. Then send him to an Earth base permanently." The Commander said. "Ignoring orders, acting like a murdering fool, and generally being slow, does not impress. Doesn't help that he embarrassed the species in front of humans. And…well you know how most elves feel about humans…he's going to be awfully unpopular for the next few centuries."

"Good. Tell Ferraidar that next time he decides to give some elflings "Earth experience" he needs to find another way to do it." Namach said.

"Tell him yourself. I'm going to be hanging off a wall in the dungeons for letting this get out of control." The elf replied.

"Can't. I'm going to be getting my head bitten off by Nvara for the same reason." Namach sighed.

"You're still telling him. He won't be so inclined to take your innards out." The elf replied.

"Yes but the last time we fought we both wound up comatose for nearly a decade healing, and destroyed a minor planetoid." Namach said. "Fae and centaurs swore to kill us both if we ever did that again, they like their favorite constellations semi-permanent." He paused, tilting his head to the side and magically searching. "You realize, don't you, that she's let the school defenses go?"

"She what?"

"Your patrol is currently getting the crap kicked out of them." Namach said calmly without expression. "I believe half the schools attack systems are…being tested…on your patrol. I imagine by the point they get out of the valley to where they can on a link to your realm they'll be a bit worse for wear. And have a whole new appreciation of Eathlings."

The Akren professors and students laughed as the elf groaned painfully. The air around them rippled and the valley rim seemed to _shiver_ with magic. Nvara must be amused as well.

"Have fun." Namach added, a fanged grin showing. "And the rest of you," he added to the students, "still have four hours of practice."

Marluck, Marluck and Ahmad herded the students off to the gyms. Minus some of the worst injured, who went off to the healer's wing or their own rooms. The student who Rahkesh had saved, a human he didn't know who was working on a simultaneous potions mastery and becoming a mediwitch, clapped Rahkesh on the shoulder in passing. Rahkesh shot her a smile, then tugged Ally along when she looked off towards the valley rim curiously.

"Taking the eyes out of an elf." Professor Marluck (male) said when they caught up to the rest. "That is going to earn you some serious points with the Alumni Association."

"Wish we could watch their sorry asses get thrashed." Ally said.

"Security reasons." Marluck said. "Sure very graduating class adds an addition to the wards, but they don't get to know everything about what's already there. You might see some in action but we prefer to avoid having anyone see them in use unless absolutely necessary. No one but the headmistress knows all of it. She's even managed to keep Tristan from finding it all."

In the gym Professor Ahmad began dividing the students into pairs for a brief exercise in dodging and general reflexes. An exercise that, while basic to all fighting and of obvious use against demons, would probably leave them all sore the next day. Dodging sharp or heavy objects thrown at random could hurt if you didn't get it right the first try. Which was a good incentive to learn to dodge of course. Rahkesh, doing a fast head count, came up with an uneven number of students…which meant he'd probably wind up paired with Ahmad. Seeing Rahkesh counting and coming to the same conclusion Daray started snickering.

"You do know, of course, that you were the _last_ person to figure out he was interested in you." Daray teased. Rahkesh glared, he had not been amused to find that _everyone_ had figured that out before he had, especially since he hadn't, Sygra had.

"Shut up." Rahkesh muttered. "I am _so_ not going to put up with that today."

"He's never actually said anything." Silas pointed out.

"Just spent an inordinate amount of time staring at you, rather obviously wishing you were wearing less." Daray leered, and broke out laughing as Rahkesh hissed out a curse in parseltongue which literally translated to "donkey whore".

"And I'm not giving him the chance, thanks. Nvara might get a tad pissed if I attacked a professor." Rahkesh said, regaining his use of English. With a flick of wandless magic he knocked over a pile of armor in a corner. With everyone turning to look Rahkesh dodged out the door. To his surprise Silas and Daray followed.

"I've got my own practice with Professor Masamba." Silas said with a shrug. The mid magics professor was monitoring his improvements in magically enhanced projected hypnotism.

"So do I." Daray said. "Sharahak is teaching me to fight demon style."

Outside the gym they went up a flight of sandy colored marble stairs. At the top Professor Namach was leaning against a stone column that had silver and ruby garlands wrapped around it. Apparently waiting for them. His hearing had probably caught the armor falling and them leaving.

"Avoiding Ahmad?" He asked, fangs showing as Rahkesh rolled his eyes at him.

"Poor basilisky." Daray teased. Rahkesh hissed, the tangy feel of venom flooding his magic. He growled when Namach's aura flared in response. But Namach was fixed on Daray.

"You'd think being attack once a day would be enough." The ancient vampire purred. Daray shrugged, bouncing a little on his feet.

"He's been bouncing off the walls without Rahkesh's help." Silas muttered. Namach eyed Daray speculatively, usually if a young vampire was acting out it meant the older vampires weren't doing enough to keep them in line. And that was Namach's job. Daray ignored him completely. Which probably meant Namach would be testing some of Daray's blood magics, to see how well he healed, Rahkesh thought. He didn't wait around to see _that _unfold. Silas followed as Rahkesh turned away from the other two. "Come on…_Nuri_?" the others turned to look at the abrupt change in Silas voice.

Nuri was spitting glowing blood and blond hairs. The panther licked his lips and glanced up at them. Before sitting down to clean his long claws. Which were covered in glowing blood.

"Oh shit." Silas whispered. He spelled the blood off Nuri's claws, but not before the panther had licked several of them clean.

"Elf blood." Namach said softly, fixed intently on the panther. The vampire's magic swirled around them, reaching out.

"What'll it do to him?" Silas asked, looking vaguely panicked.

"I have no idea." Namach replied. When all three students turned to stare at him he shrugged. "Elf blood will kill almost any magical Earth-based life form almost instantly. It's as deadly to vampires as dragon blood. However some dragons have no reaction after biting an elf. Neither do phoenixes, nor basilisks, sometimes, other times they die from it. I'm not really sure what the difference is. Nuri…is unique. He was born non-magical but he certainly has magic now. Or at least he can channel yours. However non-magical Earth life doesn't react to elf blood. He seems fine."

Nuri, having noted he was the center of attention, was wrapping himself around Silas legs in ways that ought to hurt his spine. The panther certainly _seemed_ fine. Silas knelt and looked into the panther's eyes, holding his head still.

"I can't sense anything different."

"Then best let it be." Namach replied. "Though there's nothing to be done anyway."

Rahkesh followed Silas and Nuri back to their rooms to put away their weapons. Silas was unusually silent, and Nuri wasn't acting potentially aggressive to the students they passed. Instead of going to his room Rahkesh followed Silas next door to his and sat on the desk while Silas wandered over to the couch with Nuri following closely. Silas sat silently for several minutes, stroking the panther's head. When his eyes finally refocused he turned and saw Rahkesh.

"Can you and he speak mind to mind?" Rahkesh asked.

"No. He is far more intelligent than a normal panther. My blood and close association with my mind have altered his brain into something no other panther has. But we don't use words to communicate."

"What then?"

"Impressions. Sight, sound, smell. He makes comparisons and we trade emotional impressions. Panthers also have a good sense for realizing motivations."

"I'm surprised. He seems to understand English fine."

"I think he does." Silas said, Nuri looked up and put his head on Silas knee, staring at him. The panther's tail twitched and hit Silas over the head. "Okay, yes, he does. He just doesn't usually _think_ in English. Oh he is capable of getting across that someone was in my rooms while I was gone, what they did, who they were, and even sometimes theories on why they were doing what they were. But it isn't really in words."

"Perhaps you should start trying to push him to do so." Rahkesh mused.

"Why? The elf blood?"

"Weird stuff. From another universe and all. However they use it to speed and alter the biology of those Dyalnos trees – the blood trees. And I think those were originally from Earth. The elves took the entire species and have been working on it for thousands of years, maybe hundred of thousands of years. Thing is, it worked. I wouldn't guess if thinking like a human might hurt Nuri. He'll probably never go all the way. But he might be able to communicate much better if you push his mind while the elf blood is doing…whatever. Soon I mean, before that blood has a chance to run through him and out." Rahkesh explained. Silas glanced down at Nuri and rubbed him behind the ears.

"I'll have Professor Masamba watch while we do it. He'll notice anything off." Silas said. "When do we have to be back at the Conclave?"

"Morning. Sharahak is giving an all day exposition." Rahkesh said.

"Ouch."

"Maybe not. He's been sitting silently around watching demons…act like demons. Talking might help him some." Rahkesh said slowly. Sharahak had stopped by to take a look at the Akren bodies briefly. But he hadn't appeared at the battle when Namach and the elf Commander had left to stop the students from killing each other.

"You might be right. He's really much less confident than he was." Silas agreed.

"He seemed to get along very well with Anandi." Rahkesh mentioned.

"Strangest thing I've ever seen. She's one vicious piece of work. Gets into all sorts of fights with the other City Masters over her cruelty and some amazing human right abuses." Silas said, shaking his head.

"Didn't seem to bother Sharahak. He actually likes her. You can tell when he disapproves, his spines shift all sideways. He was genuinely happy to see her at the Conclave – his face spines flattened and his eye ridges." Rahkesh said. Learning demon expressions had been something of a necessity when Daray hadn't yet transformed and was having trouble. He'd applied the same to Sharahak very quickly and found the demons pretty easy to read. They communicated more through body language than humans did through facial expressions.

"I wonder how. He's no pacifist, but he doesn't like deliberately hurting people for no good reason." Silas wondered. Rahkesh shrugged it off; Sharahak was rather hard to understand at times.

"I wonder if he had anything to say about the demon in the lab." Rahkesh wondered.

"Go ask Namach."

"You think he's done tearing Daray to shreds yet?" Rahkesh asked curiously. Silas laughed.

"You know sometimes I pity him for being so powerful so young. Makes self control much harder, vampiric urges are harder to manage." Silas said. "Actually I bet Namach sent him off to do his next ritual. It's the magic-focusing one. Daray's been a bit off for several days and I don't think it's just a normal vampire not having enough controlling elders around. I bet his magic has finally settled and now that it feels different and isn't changing he's not quite sure what to do. After so long being messed up it probably feels weird to be normal. Namach's been telling him he should do the first focusing ritual to really meld with his new magics."

"I should probably be doing that too." Rahkesh sighed. "Suppose I'll go talk to the professor. Might not be such a great idea to be doing bloodmagic right now. That stuff's permanent and my current state is not."

"Thank goodness." Silas muttered.

XX

Rahkesh put away his weapons and changed his bloodstained clothes. His trunk bumbed and vibrated beside the bed. Rahkesh tossed two calming spells at it and a motion-restricting spell. The movement stopped. His invisibility cloak was trying to get out again. Rahkesh had added an extra padlock to the trunk. He was starting to wonder if he should chain it shut, incase the magic failed. That thing was intent on murder. Leaving his miserable failure at animation spells for another time Rahkesh went to find Namach and Xanthius.

Rahkesh arrived at Professor Namach's rooms, avoiding other students on the way there. The door opened before he touched it, as usual. Inside the two ancient suits of armor were switching places against the entrance walls. Rahkesh watched them curiously, wondering when, exactly, they had originally been made. When they were done he moved past.

Rahkesh paused at the sight of an unfamiliar person. It was a tall man with sandy hair and a slightly block-like head. Then the man _rippled_ and Rahkesh realized he was looking at an illusion. It rippled again, and spots began to appear through it. The spots were creamy gray.

"Sharahak?" Rahkesh asked curiously. Walking over he prodded the faltering illusion. It snapped and dissipated.

"I think it's time to give up." Namach said from across the room. The vampire was sitting in a marble and redwood armchair. Rahkesh looked around for Eli and found him outside on the balcony, lying on a sunny tree branch thicker than Rahkesh's body.

"What are you trying to do? Everyone already knows he's a demon." Rahkesh pointed out. The Conclave had been sent around the world and Sharahak had been walking around.

"No they don't. Just the representatives. Everyone else saw an illusion." Sharahak said.

"In that case we attached it to the recording magics." Namach added. "Apparently demons can't wear illusions."

"Not too surprising." Rahkesh said, "they're from another universe."

"But disappointing," Sharahak said, "I can't go out anywhere unless I wear several layers of general concealment spells and _then_ an illusion, and that doesn't last more than an hour or so."

The demon shrugged his wings, the last the magic falling off in a bright splash of color. The disappointment was clear on his face. He was always going to be drawing attention everywhere he went. Rahkesh, knowing how _that_ felt, could sympathize. He, at least, had been able to hide from his fame some of the time. Sharahak was going to stand out everywhere. And with everyone hating demons (with good reason) he might well be in danger from people who didn't know who he was.

"Perhaps you should go have a press conference." Rahkesh suggested. "It might get you out of anyone attacking you."

"That is a good idea." Namach agreed when Sharahak winced. "You're not safe right now."

"Did the elves have anything to say about the demons?" Rahkesh asked, changing the topic when Sharahak apparently ignored their suggestions. He would have to fully announce himself eventually, but Sharahak seemed intent on avoiding it a little longer.

"Not much." Namach said, "I think they came just to make sure that the demons attacking us here are the same demons they're fighting elsewhere. The demon species is so spread out across so many places that I think the elves are seriously concerned about them evolving into more subspecies, which could be even more difficult to deal with. They just established that the demons we're dealing with are known subspecies."

"I suppose we can call that good news." Rahkesh mused.

"Maybe."

"You know what we should have done?" Rahkesh asked, "we should have attached magical recording devices to those pixies we sent through."

"How would we get the recording back?" Namach asked. "Magical transmission through the portals doesn't work."

"It would have to be a magical recorder, that sent signal the muggle way." Rahkesh said.

"To do that it would have to have non-magic components and circuits don't survive going through a portal intact." Sharahak said.

"Magical device, sending signals the way a muggle one does. No circuits or muggle projecting equipment needed, just muggle receiving stuff." Namach said, catching on. "Maybe, but spells don't stay intact going through either."

"They don't?"

"No." Sharahak said, "the spells I had on me when I went through failed immediately."

"Never mind." Rahkesh muttered.

"How's the snake?" Namach asked as Rahkesh's magic was still feeling venomous. The power wrapped Rahkesh closely as he moved, flowing with his now-silent steps.

"Well enough. I managed not to transform and bite any elves in half." Rahkesh said with a shrug.

"Good enough for the moment."

"I was wondering if you think it's safe for me to attempt bloodmagic like this." Rahkesh said. Namach frowned, and his eyes changing. The silver got a cold icy look and began to glitter, streaking of white and darker silver appearing. Bloodmagic flared in swirling rune patterns around his eyes, down his neck and chest, and across his forearms.

"Possibly. What rituals are you thinking of trying?"

"The magic focusing one first," Rahkesh said, "or I could begin my magic direction set." He had completed forty-three personal bloodmagic rituals. But his secrecy web was his only piece of bloodmagic that hadn't been focused on altering himself in some way.

Rituals against muscles atrophying, healing illnesses, preventing the development of allergies, improving balance, those were all well and good. However it was only the most basic bloodmagic. The first stuff ever developed had been to improve the human body. Binding a large group to secrecy about certain information, or certain people, was much more complex and useful.

If he was going to go further in bloodmagic he would require the solid foundation that improved the body so that it wouldn't fail him during rituals, when a slight illness might derail everything. He would also absolutely need the magic directing and focusing for any undertakings more complex than what he had done. His first secrecy web had only barely worked. With a solid start at the directing and focusing sets (each over twenty rituals long) would enable him to continue in bloodmagic.

It was by building up the individual's magic through rituals that bloodmages reached the level where they could create blood wards over entire islands. Doing that was not a set at all; it was almost another branch of bloodmagic entirely, where you were no longer affecting yourself. Rahkesh was only in the beginner phase of bloodmagic, but he was just about where he needed to start seriously advancing into other stuff.

"I also need to do another ritual enhance memory, but with snake instincts everywhere I though playing with my brain wasn't such a good idea." Rahkesh said.

"I read your report on your secrecy web. Namach said. "It was well done but you really do need the focusing and directing capabilities those rituals will give you. They'll refine the way the magic channels through you and your ability to direct it within and out of blood. Try the directing one. The basilisk will have a conflict with the focusing since it is parselmagic."

"Is that going to become a serious problem?" Rahkesh asked. His parselmagic didn't work quite like the other magics. Parseltongue had been added to the naturally occurring human magics. It was rare because the individual's magic needed to be capable of aligning with it or they wouldn't get the parseltongue magic at all. His aligned with it. But it was still different.

"Probably. At some point you'll need to remake the interaction between your magic and the parselmagic. But not yet. You'll need more mindmagic training, and training at tracing magical flows through the body. That sort of work takes place at such a deeply internal level that many simply can't. They can't get that deep into their own magical/mental workings and remain conscious. I suspect you'll be able to do it, but if you can't it'll be the thing that stops you from progressing any further. Fortunately you're not a complete parseltongue, your magic is broken. That will help a lot. I've never heard of a whole parseltongue managing to get past the magical conflict. Broken ones can. Mind you there's only been a handful who've wanted to go that far, but they all could.

However you won't be doing that at all until you resolve the missing piece of your soul and either destroy it or retrieve it." Namach added. "Don't' worry about the parselmagic right now, you're not near there yet."

"Is the snake-chamber available?" Rahkesh asked. If he was going to begin working on the magic directing ritual he needed to get it worked out and for that he needed to know how to work with the chamber. Bloodmagic chambers were all different and the magic user worked with them as much as they did with the knives.

"Yes. But it might not be the best idea." Namach said, "that was a male basilisk, driven insane with anger. You're magic is awfully territorial at the moment. Even if that thing is dead the magic it is still releasing, and what the chamber as accumulated since its death, will awaken all the snake territorial instincts."

"Not the angel chamber." Rahkesh said.

"No certainly not. I was actually thinking the obsidian and fulgurite one." Namach said. Rahkesh stared and grinned. That chamber was almost never used, and only by some students doing higher level stuff.

"It is uniquely well suited to you." Sharahak said, grinning. "Fulgurite being formed from lightning and all."

"And your species of basilisks produces obsidian in its eggshells." Namach added.

"I thought basilisks were born from chickens eggs hatched under toads?" Sharahak asked.

"They are. What species the hatchling is depends upon the toad, the person involved, the type of chicken, and the location on the Earth it is done. Real basilisks only lay eggs a half dozen or less times in their life. We've got a yearly breeding season, when we're not hybernating, but almost never do the females actualyl lay eggs." Rahkesh said. "And usually it is only one each time. The species is barely naturally occurring. All the subspecies interbreed; there aren't enough of each subspecies to be healthy otherwise. What species the hatchling is depends upon the parents and location the egg is laid."

"It is very interesting that of your dominant animal forms, one doesn't survive for any longer than it takes for the storm that created it to burn out, it is completely spawned by wild magic and weather events, and the other barely survives in the wild and was originally created by humans experimenting with toads." Namach said.

Before Rahkesh could come up with a reply, which he couldn't really. An eagle flew in through the open balcony door and landed on a perch Namach conjured. It held out a white envelope, waited until Namach had broken, the seal, and flew away. Namach read the few lines quickly.

The ancient vampire's face turned dark and furious then he threw back his head and started to laugh.

"Our dearest self proclaimed "dark lord" is insulted he was not invited to the Conclave!" Namach laughed, "and so has invited himself!"

-

Please Review!

I know this took a little while, sorry about that, but it's still up to the usual length (12,000+ words this chapter).

**There is now a spin-off fic for this! A Night off at Akren Mountain School of Magic being written by the amazing happyIbanes423! Go read it. Light humor. **

**Fanart! Being done by the magnificent Maria! Go check out Rahkesh and Silas! See my author's page for links!**

These last few chapters have been really tough to write. I've got all this stuff planned for Voldemort, the demons, dealing with them, it's all planned and partly written but first I have to get to that point.

On another note I thought I should give you fair warning that I will be going abroad from late January to early May. Given the type of work I do is generally away from civilization internet access will be possible, in a slightly random fashion. However writing time is expected to be significantly less. Maybe not, I don't know, but at this point it looks that way. I will probably post two chapters over the rest of December and January. After that updates may be few. And sometime in May I'll be heading away again for a summer of field work.

On the other hand I may get really inspired/bored and decide to finish up this fic so I can get started on the final piece of the trilogy. Really, the third part is what I've been wanting to write since the beginning. Before I started A Second Chance at Life I had the third part planned out with everything I wanted. The final piece is actually my reason for writing all of this. So now that I'm getting close to the _really_ cool stuff (yeah, it gets better) I may speed up for my last months with a computer before six to seven months of little access.

Anyhow, reviews feed the muse and are the best way to stave off writer's block so review!


	19. Chapter 19

First I'd like to apologize for not getting out as many chapters these past few weeks as I thought I would. I've been writing when I can find the time, but I had an unexpected death in the family and a little kitten to care for in addition to work so I've been much busier than I thought I would be.

Chapter 19

Rahkesh rubbed his fingers gently over the leg, it felt like velvet. The broken bone was between his hand and the tip of his wand. Slowly the spell wound its way into the soft skin. Rahkesh focused on the healing, bone fusing, flesh mends inflamed areas calming, marrow settling. A shimmer crossed the dark skin and the glittery spell showing what was happening beneath the skin shifted and bone healed. Rahkesh cast the spell to scan the marrow and saw it healed as well. Next he cast an anti-inflammatory across the site. It worked and swelling began to visibly recede.

The dark puppy on the table thumped its tail hard at him and licked his hand as he drew back. Rahkesh rubbed it behind the ears, amused at how hard it was beating its tail. It was going to break _that_ in a minute. He closed the spell recording his healing and tucked the silver sphere into his bag. Then he made sure that his notice-me-not spell was in place, and slipped out of the animal rescue center and apparated away.

Like everything else at Akren the assignment served multiple purposes. The students had to get into a place, heal an injured animal, and get out again without being caught. Fortunately the average animal rescue center did not have the most state of the art security, and one in the middle of no-where Canada certainly did not. Rahkesh arrived at the plain looking entrance from the muggle world into the Akren Mountains. Taking a portkey to the valley's entrance he found the firehorse waiting for him where he'd left it. The big animal snorted and pawed the ground as Rahkesh swung onto his back.

Back at the school Rahkesh dropped off the horse in the stables, then took the recorder at the office of the professor of his healing class.

"Good morning Thunder. How is the Conclave going?" Professor Zavens asked from his extremely cushy swivel chair. His office was filled with multiple degrees in medicine from muggle universities, and his trials results for his mediwizard tests. He was one of the world's top twenty, and, as a result, had his pick of jobs. One photo on the wall showed him in Africa, shortly after his discovery of the organism responsible for magical malaria. Unfortunately he'd also caught the disease multiple times, along with magical ebola, and decided to retire to teaching. He taught two entry level healing courses, then two more very advanced courses, one of which was at the AAA medical center and available to any alumni.

"No good news." Rahkesh replied. "We've got next to no chance of winning this."

"Is that vampire-demon creature speaking today?"

"Yes, Sharahak asked to have the entire Conclave present. He's giving an overview of how he got there. Then he'll answer any questions anyone can think of."

"What about sending in questions?"

"Send them to your representatives." Rahkesh said. He _thought_ professor Zavens was entirely, or at least mostly, human, but sometimes it was hard to tell. Zavens ears were _awfully _pointed. But his hair was solid gray, fae's hair tended to just go white. And his skin looked like he'd had bad acne at some point, fae didn't get that.

"Are you allowed to ask questions?" Zavens asked.

"I suppose so." Rahkesh said, "no one told me I couldn't. And since I've met demons more than most I don't suppose they'd mind."

"Then ask how well demons heal from acid-caused injuries." Zavens said. "We've got an alumnus who wants to know."

"Sure." Rahkesh said, Akren alumni, and students, always did favors for each other, even dangerous ones, "he making acid-bombs or something?"

"Or something." Professor Zavens replied with a shrug. Rahkesh guessed that Zavens did in fact know what the alumnus in question was up to, but wasn't about to say. If it didn't work against demons it was still useful on the world market, just not legal, and therefore the less Rahkesh knew the better. He wasn't about to talk to anyone about something an alumnus was doing, Akren loyalty and all, but stuff that got out accidentally could be traced to a source and could cause trouble. Rahkesh didn't mind. Alumni did a lot of things for each other without knowing why or what for. Not asking questions and silence was assured between students and graduates of the school, and part of the reason why they were all so successful.

"Anything else?"

"Any information he has on diseases demons are susceptible to would be nice. It would be perfect if our world could produce something to meet that thing they've tossed us. We've certainly got plenty of viruses; they must have come into contact with some during their various attempted invasions. However I suspect the human representatives have already gotten instructions to ask. The American CDC has been turning out large samples of every magical and non-magical bacteria and virus that might possibly harm demons. They're looking for test subjects now."

"Tell that to the Ateres vampires. They've got a few captives, I'm sure they could spare one." Rahkesh said. Not feeling at all sorry for the demon chosen. This was war. "I knew you doctors always had some evil thoughts, and never mind that oath."

Professor Zavens laughed, coldly, making Rahkesh suppress a shiver. "The Akren-trained healers, plus our colleagues from Vorelli Academy, have decided that the Hippocratic oath only applies to all beings from this universe, and all sentient life forms in the MLFC, local or not. Demons, therefore, do not count."

Rahkesh smiled, nodded, and slowly walked out. Perhaps it was every healer's dream to be able to toss every nasty microbe they could find at an enemy they could hate. If you knew that much about life, then you had to occasionally think about using it in a contrary manner. Maybe they would find something to use against the demons. Earth had plenty nasty life forms of its own.

Vorelli Academy was a highly selective training system for magical healers of every species. Like Akren it was almost its own entity, but it specialized only in medicine. It was a little surprising that they were okay with the idea of using biological warfare, more of a stretch than for any Akren-trained healer.

Even though some students who became healers made it through Akren without killing anyone – no one really wanted a top-healer angry at them - they were certainly not strangers to death and violence. The Vorelli lot had a class to specifically accustom them to blood and death during their first year – the students selected to be trained there were such pacifists they actually needed such a thing.

On the way to his rooms Rahkesh heard commotion coming from the stairway leading to one of the gyms. The one with the dueling rooms. Seeing no one else in the hallways and given the amount of noise he figured most of the school had to be there. Some fight worth seeing then.

It certainly was a fight worth seeing. Two vampires were fighting in the largest dueling ring. One was Hilda Jakisep, the current lead vampire among the students. The other was unknown to Rahkesh, though he'd seen her frequently. She was an odd looking creature, sort-of-Chinese but with fairly dark skin and with a perpetual sneer, though she was supposed to be far more kindly than her appearance would lead anyone to believe.

Rahkesh found Daray and Silas quickly. Silas was off in the shadows against a wall. Reading a book and paying not the slightest attention to the fight. Nuri was doing that for him. Daray, always the perfect subordinate, was sitting on the floor next to Professor Namach, who had taken one of the few chairs in the hall. A big chair of solid oak with ornate engravings and more than a few burn marks from stray spells. The always impressive vampire Lord managed to make the beat up old thing look like a throne.

Rianae and Ally were nearby. As Rahkesh made his way around to them he realized that every vampire student was present - and most of the others as well. Having the vampires present when Akren's top vampire was being challenged was not unusual. Having almost everyone else there as well _was_ odd.

"Who is that?" Rahkesh asked Rianae, assuming, being a vampire, she would know.

"Stephanie Laross, a part Chinese, part Indian vampire who was adopted and turned as an infant by the Captain of the Guard of the Master of Boston (United States)." Rianae replied easily.

"Is there a reason that _everyone_ is here?"

"Ranking duel, and an almost-battle between species. Stephanie was going after some of the fae that are new this year. She was being pretty nasty about it. She got into a big fight in the main hall earlier with a bunch of the fae. Stephanie is awfully nice, except when she's at the other extreme. Anyhow a few of the fae got roughed up, torn throats and all. Now normally that would be just fine, but Stephanie was going a bit farther than the other fae were willing to let her. So a whole bunch of the older fae went after her. Stephanie refused to stop, and bunch of other vampires backed her. For a while it looked like we might have a real battle between the vampires and the fae. Of course everyone would have to support their own side.

Then the humans and werewolves started threatening everyone for messing up their study session in the lounge off the main hall. Then Hilda showed up and decided that none of us needed to get our asses kicked by pissed off teachers. Ever since news of the invasion they've been going all we're-on-the-same-side thing with everyone. Eventually Hilda told Stephanie she was pushing it too much and to lay off a little. Stephanie challenged her. So of course everyone's here. If Stephanie wins she'll really push for more conflict because she really does believe it's a good way to weed out the weak, and that the strong should rule. True vampire that one.

"I sense a "but" there."

"But if she does win there's a good chance she'll have to outfight every fae, human, and werewolf in the school because they don't like her superiority complex. Stephanie doesn't really believe in keeping the peace much.

Now I know one of the new fae has some real issues and really was just asking for a beating. Everyone would agree with that. The little brat even pisses off his own species, but it would have been better if Stephanie had gone after _just_ him. Instead she went after the others as well for not keeping him in line."

"Funny how we mortal humans don't seem to have such problems." Rahkesh said.

"Whatever Thunder, what about the one the year before we got here who called werewolves and vampires "diseased off-shoots of a natural species" and got killed for that". Rianae quickly replied. Rahkesh shrugged, humans didn't start stuff like this nearly as often as the vampires and fae did. Or the vampires and the werewolves, but that conflict was so much an accepted part of life that no one bothered to stop, they just stepped around the duelers. Vampires and werewolves usually hated each other unless they had a good reason not to.

"Specific weapons?" Rahkesh asked, watching Hilda pull out her signature weapon – a broadsword that looked way to heavy for someone of her stature to wield. Telepathic magic was flying between the two, but very tightly controlled. So much so that it was hard to feel at all. The ground had broken glass on it and steam rose from some points. Someone had been throwing acid. Stephanie had blue and red liquid flowing from a gaping wound on her left leg. Which she ignored completely. Hilda had blood flowing sluggishly from a wound on her right shoulder.

"No threadmagic or bloodmagic. I think anything else goes." Rianae said.

"Why?" Rahkesh asked.

"Good question. No idea. Neither of them specializes in those to the extent it might be removed. If they did this fight wouldn't be happening. The one with the better abilities would have won."

"They're doing it so that no bystanders get hurt. Neither has enough skill to keep threadmagic or bloodmagic controlled in a tricky situation. And an injured observer might decide to attack the one who hurt them, after they're all tired from the fight." Daray said from beside Namach's knee. "There's no shield around them right now, nothing to stop a loose bit of magic."

"Why not?"

"Werewolves wrecked the room's magics last night." Benjamin said from behind them. "Spell was supposed to help a controlled transformation during times other than the full moon. Reacted badly with Halax's bloodmagic. Pretty spectacular. He's still comatose."

Rahkesh turned back to meet Ally's snort and raised eyebrow. The lack of details from Benjamin meant the werewolves were probably a bit embarrassed by the mess. Which undoubtedly, the professors had assigned them to fixing. That they hadn't managed to fix the problem by breakfast reflected badly on the skills of all of them.

"Seen the paper this morning?" Rianae asked.

"No. I just got back from an assignment." Rahkesh said. Rianae handed him three papers from her bag.

""Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland are officially removing themselves from the Dark Magical Beings Eradication Union. They've all had violent uprisings the past few days. New government policy mirrors Russia's – no _species_ can be declared illegal under any circumstances. So-called "dark magics" are being re-evaluated and most of laws restricting non-humans have been completely removed." Rianae summarized as Rahkesh flipped open the first paper.

"Progress."

"Definitely, mind you with newly elected Minister Stocklir going to work on them they could hardly do anything else. She's got so much support in each of those nations she might as well be leading all of them."

"It would be nice if she'd returned from China earlier." Rahkesh said, "we might have avoided some of this."

"Maybe, maybe she stayed away intentionally because she thought it would be better to start over this way. Have you ever been there Thunder?"

"China? No."

"They're magical community is scary secretive. Hard to get any sort of news in or out. She may not have known how bad it was. And she was helping them get rid of their own "Dark Lord". Personally I think she wanted a war just to have a place to start over from."

"Start over…" Rahkesh mused, "if only we could. Try again; create a better society from scratch…"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. Wishful thinking." Rahkesh said, putting the thought aside for later. The crowd around them cheered as Stephanie collapsed, blood flying everywhere. "Well as much fun as this is, we need to get going if we don't want to be late to the Conclave."

"I suppose I can get someone else's memory of the fight." Daray agreed. "Marcus?" He wandered off in the direction of the other vampire. Marcus was good friend of his who, since he was being trained as a healer, was on agreeable terms with just about everyone.

"Is Sharahak already there?" Silas asked, appearing beside them silently.

"No idea." Rahkesh said, turning to Professor Namach.

"He is…and so am I." Namach replied, smiling. The students around them turned to stare at the ancient vampire. Lounging calmly in one of the throne-like chairs the vampire didn't seem to realize he'd said anything unusual.

"Oh…is this golem?" Rahkesh guessed.

Namach smiled approvingly, all fangs, "very good."

Rahkesh walked around him once, too fascinated to realize, or care, that he was staring rather rudely. It certainly looked exactly like Namach, the magic felt like him. The eyes even had the same glitter as they followed Rahkesh's movements.

"When do we start learning to make those?" Rahkesh asked.

"At least a year." Namach replied, and smiled again at Rahkesh's disappointed look. "I could just call off this fight until later; the school is my territory so I do have the right to oversee all fights. But I felt like practicing. This golem is built a bit differently than any other I've made." He paused for a moment, as if the golem were receiving instructions. "Meet me at the entrance hall."

The entrance hall was empty, all the students observing the fight, in class, or studying. Namach was already there, pacing before the massive doors.

"What's the plan?" Daray asked, already informed of what was expected at the Conclave that day.

"Voldemort sees himself as the primary authority in most of the plague-hit nations. As such he thinks he ought to have been invited as a representative, since his nations were the ones worst harmed so far." Namach said.

"He called them "his" did he?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes. He has been very quick to exploit the lack of any other leadership. Especially since the anti-dark-everything movement has fallen apart. Some of the old remaining pureblood families are taking control in most countries. They, of course, are loyal to Voldemort. The others have been killed or disappeared. No one's investigating deaths very closely so it was easy for Voldemort to get it done and say it was the plague that killed them."

"Have all the representatives been informed?" Daray asked as Namach teleported them to the Conclave building.

Rahkesh let out a slow breath, as always Namach's version of teleportation didn't really agree with him. It was too smooth; there was no feeling of travel, just an instantaneous transition. One moment he was standing on the solid stone of the entrance hall, the next he was on grass right outside the Conclave building. There wasn't even a movement of air to signal the trip. No solid landing, he was just _there, _every time it was enough of a shock, even when he expected it, to almost make him stumble, and that wouldn't do at all. Others were arriving, people popping into existence everywhere. They stepped out of the way and headed for the building as a few centaurs appeared behind them.

"Yes. There was some resentment towards the humans at having such a maniac messing things up. Mrs. Stocklir put a stop to that fast. She's decided it's up to the humans to deal with Voldemort."

Rahkesh groaned, "great, just great. I think I may need to leave if everyone wants a chance at him."

"Why?" Silas asked. The centaurs sidestepped around them and trotted ahead, followed by two sleek cheetahs, who were either fae representatives or someone's familiars.

"Because Voldemort is a parseltongue and a basilisk." Rahkesh replied. Daray started snickering. "It's not funny. I have no idea if he's as off right now as I am but if he is nothing short of an atomic bomb is going to stop us."

"Remember Thunder, you are not a representative; therefore you're not supposed to get involved. Stay in the back if possible." Namach said. "The human representatives met earlier and made some sort of plan. They didn't include you because you're not one of them. Just try to stay out of any fight that develops. We don't need an international audience seeing a non-representative getting involved. However, Mrs. Stocklir is not known for overlooking things, I'm sure she's anticipated any difficulties between warring basilisks."

"Except that Voldemort will see my siding with the Conclave to be a betrayal of what he feels parseltongues ought to be." Rahkesh muttered. "And I'm sure he'll have plenty to say about it." Daray and Silas broke off to go find one of the other Ateres. Rahkesh followed Namach towards the main hall.

"Will he sense who you are?" Namach asked softly. Rahkesh couldn't feel the concealing and anti-eavesdropping magics the vampire was using, but he knew they were there.

"No probably not. He makes a lot of assumptions easily. He'll have no problem believing anything he hears about my past."

"Have you come up with a method for ending his existence without ending yours?"

"Yes I think so."

"You think so or you _know_?" Rahkesh didn't respond, Namach raised an eyebrow and turned towards the massive doors, "we'll discuss it after this."

A casual glance from Namach had a young vampire by the door opening it for them and holding until they'd passed. A dark angel appeared briefly along the ceiling, flying along in a wave of black fire that looked like it was moving _in_ the stone. A second later a half dozen vampires converged on them, Sharahak moving along to one side. The attempt at an illusion had failed again, and so the masking spells were again inside the recording devices rather than on him. His massive wings dwarfed everyone and the vampires around him were staying well away from his tail, which swayed a little when he was walking upright.

Rahkesh broke off from the group to go find the humans. Being surrounded by a pack of very old and very powerful vampires made him more than a little uneasy. He always felt like they examined him as a potential meal – which, of course, he was. Mad Eye was there, talking with Mrs. Stocklir. A large crowd other humans were lingering nearby, waiting for the main hall of the Conclave building to open. One of the representatives, a tall elderly man with almost no hair, wearing heavy dark gold robes, turned, noted Rahkesh, and immediately pushed through the crowd.

"Ah, you are Rahkesh Asmodaeus correct?" He asked softly.

"Yes, and you sir?" Rahkesh asked, and watched as the man's dimpled face broke into an excited grin.

"Minister Yi, of South Korea." Rahkesh shook his hand, wondering warily why he was smiling like he'd just won the lottery. "I have your book, it is an excellent read."

"I'm glad you enjoyed it."

"Yes, yes, very interesting. My and wife and I are very grateful. Our son you see…he picked up a pet snake recently and his grandmother found him hissing to it, then it hissed back and nodded. Poor woman had a heart attack right on the spot." Minister Yi said, talking very fast and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

"Oh." Rahkesh said, starting to understand where this was going. "Is she alright?" Minister Yi waved off the question, still bouncing.

"Fine, fine. Got over it once she read your book." Rahkesh nodded, wondering if he meant the heart attack or the shock of having a parseltongue grandson.

"How old is your son?"

"Five. My wife is taking him to meet Mr. Ramdas this weekend." Rahkesh nodded, Ramdas was an aging parseltongue living in India who had offered to act as contact and advisor for young parseltongues until he go too old to do so. His name and contact information were in the parseltongue book.

"That is probably a wise thing to do. Mr. Ramdas is one of the few parseltongues with a fully intact ability."

"Yes, but I was wondering, my son broke a leg yesterday. Will this harm his parselmagic?"

"No, certainly not. As long as the bone is properly set and seen to it won't be a problem. It would take an injury much more severe to endanger his healing magics." Rahkesh said, understanding at once. A young parseltongue's healing ability shattered easily. But not _that_ easily. A bullet to the head would certainly snap the healing magics, but not a broken leg. Minister Yi, looking much relieved, finally stopped bouncing around and relaxed a little.

"Oh thank you, that is good to know. My wife is in a…tizzy." He said with a sigh. Another of the human representatives, a wrinkled man with soft brown eyes and a rather large nose, had been listening behind Minister Yi, and chuckled at his word choice. Yi turned quickly with a start. Apparently he was permanently jittery?

"Amar Mitul." Yi said at once, waving a hand over to Rahkesh, "Rahkesh Asmodaeus."

"Did anyone bother to tell our self-invited guest when he should arrive?" Rahkesh asked as they shook hands. Amar was carrying the Akren signature and a quick glance in the soft eyes revealed an inner hardness and capablility. Whoever Mr. Mitul was, he knew how to handle himself in a fight. And he had a…coldness…that told Rahkesh that he was no stranger to violence.

"He was told to arrive fifteen minutes after everyone else. So we have a little time." Mr. Mitul said, with a slightly wolfish grin. Rahkesh grinned back. Minister Yi looked worried.

"Will this be a problem for you – being a parseltongue as well?"

"Unfortunately it probably will be. Most parseltongues have a snake form and, at the moment, three of us have basilisk forms. Voldemort and I are two of those. Basilisks are also very territorial, for my species that is especially true at this time of year." Rahkesh said, knowing Mrs. Stocklir was listening along with Mad Eye, a few feet away. The third with a basilisk form, so everyone assumed, was Harry Potter. Some of the papers had reported on it, Rahkesh had not corrected them. Though if Voldemort asked he would say that Harry Potter was _not yet_ a basilisk. This would be useful for explaining away anything Rahkesh had to do in snake form. It was just the third, who was in hiding of course.

"So he may be more inclined to attack than he otherwise would be?" Mrs. Stocklir asked.

"I do not know if his species is as strongly territorial as mine. I can_ probably_ control my magic from attacking him."

"But when we explain why he is not welcome here he will probably attack." Mad Eye said, "parselmagic or no parselmagic."

"Probably but-

Rahkesh stopped abruptly, freezing over as a strange sensation flittered over the edge of his senses. Snake magic rose around him, invisible, hissing softly. The feel of a venomous lethal magic had the others backing away quickly in alarm. The air stirred around Rahkesh and conversation seemed to go silent as all his senses turned to focus. Others in the room were still talking, but he heard none of it.

Magic washed out in coils from him, Rahkesh let it go, let it raise the hairs on the necks of everyone in the hall. The lights flickered going soft and shadowy in the corners, but the air around Rahkesh sparkled. The cool chill of death made the air feel light and thin. Slowly everyone began to rotate, feeling the magic and reacting. Mostly in alarm, surprise, then defensive curiosity. No weapons were drawn but in a minute every person in the room was facing the frozen young human. The magic wrapped around him like the coils of snake was almost visible, making the light bend oddly. Then Rahkesh drew it back in. It spread across the floor, falling out of the air, the light returned to normal. Slowly it raced back to him wrapped around, and sank inside.

Rahkesh returned to himself, aware that every face in the room was watching him. Knowing, distantly, and without alarm, that he had just drawn an awful lot of unwanted attention. The snake's alert senses and cool indifference allowed him to avoid panic. Without moving anything, even his eyes, he located the people closest to him, and thought fast. This needed to _look_ good.

With a sigh Rahkesh dropped his head a little and brought the last of his magic back to himself, making his hands glow briefly. Then he raised his head and turned to where he knew Mrs. Stocklir would be.

"Our guest is early, and he's in quite a temper." Rahkesh said softly. Wrapping his arms around himself and waiting motionlessly. Mrs. Stocklir eyed him for a moment, then nodded sharply.

"Let's get this over with." She said sharply to the humans around her, and moved purposefully to the front doors. The humans in the hall followed, Rahkesh waited until all the others had passed. Then he let Sygra slip out of his collar and onto his shoulder. His familiar rubbed her cheek against his, Rahkesh, well aware of everyone's eyes on him, stroked her head gently and followed the rest.

_This will not end well_ He sent as a silent warning to Daray. Daray blinked as he sent the message on to the dark angels who would be shielding the buildings against any stray magic if a fight occurred.

Voldemort stood several meters from the front doors, waiting for them. He was dressed in heavy black and silver robes and looking gothic enough that Rahkesh had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing. The death's head and serpent pendant hanging from Voldemort's neck was really just too perfect. Flanking Voldemort were seven death eaters. Seven because of random chance or because it was a lucky number? Rahkesh wondered, realizing belatedly that his snake self was on a drug-like high of adrenaline and fury that was allowing his insane humor.

Rahkesh was standing to the back and to the side of the group of humans. He should probably have stayed inside, but he had a suspicion that Voldemort would seek him out. And better to be almost available, and to be able to turn things over to Mrs. Stocklir. The tiny old woman had stopped, leaving a space between herself and Voldemort, space enough to see a spell coming and dodge. Just barely enough space for that, while not far enough to insult or seem afraid. Mrs. Stocklir didn't do anything without thinking about it. She had even arranged the human representatives so that the harmless appearing ones were in front, with the ones who had a reputation as fighters just behind them. The first row could duck and stay low to give space for the ones behind to attack.

"Mrs. Stocklir...sorry, _Minister_ Stocklir. We finally meet." Voldemort said, with a sweeping bow. Rahkesh bit his cheek again and got a sharp nudge from Sygra.

_Laughing right now would be problematic._ Sygra hissed very softly in his ear.

"A pleasure." Minister Stocklir replied dryly, sounding singularly underwhelmed by Europe's foremost dark wizard. The old woman might be famed for her tactical and organizational skills, but probably not so much her diplomatic ones, or maybe she was just feeling cantankerous. A lifetime of working against megalomaniacs bent on taking over the world might have that affect.

"Your letter was perfectly bland. As a result none of us have any idea as to what part of not being summoned to appear as a representative offended you." Minister Stocklir continued. Rahkesh opinion of the old woman shot up a hundred fold. She had just asked Voldemort why he was _insulted_ that he had _not_ been issued _orders_ to appear. Behind him he could hear chuckles and whispers from the other species present.

Voldemort, for his part, didn't give any sign of a reaction at all. In fact he was just a little _too_ blank. Rahkesh wondered if he was trying to restrain himself. And probably promising to himself to kill Minister Stocklir in some horribly painful way. Rahkesh assumed she had gotten a lot of that over her life. Probably from some nastier wizards than Voldemort, and where were those ones now? Long dead. She probably didn't care what Voldemort thought or how he wanted to kill her.

"I should think that my objection to not being included as a representative would be obvious." Voldemort replied smoothly. "As one of the foremost wizards in Europe I should have been notified. However I am also clearly the chief representative of a sizeable faction of society. My people are in this same crisis and our vote will be ignored by this Council."

Well he certainly knew how to make himself almost sympathetic. And he knew how to cast a challenge. Rahkesh thought, waiting for some reaction. It was amusing to hear Voldemort talk about his people's voices needing to be heard, since he came up with the viewpoint which everyone who didn't want to die had to express. Saying that his followers were not being represented by any of the humans present was also a bold move. There were several humans who would have been classed as "dark" by the original British Ministry, and many who would have been called "dark" by the radical "light" groups. Voldemort was taking a stand against all of them. Was the man insane?

"You are not a member of any government. We might have considered you as one of many nongovernmental groups. However, those were only considered when they had issued formal statements of their cause. You have not. Therefore you present yourself as a wizard of great power who does not have a cohesive reason for his actions. No cause, no reason for your criminal actions. You don't even profit financially. Therefore you and your followers must be radicals whose only reason for being is to cause terror. You have no purpose. Why would we consider you at all, never mind actually select you?" Minister Stocklir replied coldly. Rahkesh blinked and stared, surprised. Voldemort had never bothered to tell the world what he wanted to do? Or maybe just not the international magical community?

"My being the head of a large community of wizards ought to be enough."

"A large community? I fail to see this. I see a large group of weak slaves tied to you by magic." Minister Stocklir said. "Tell me, how can we work together if you are afraid of having equals?"

Rahkesh heard more snickers, out of the corner of one eye he saw dark angels flying along inside the stone of the buildings. Magic was beginning to spark on the roofs. Minister Stocklir was not trying to get Voldemort to leave peaceably. She didn't want an agreement. She wanted him gone and discouraged. This had _never_ had a non-violent resolution.

"You received numerous notices from dark wizards around the world naming me as their chosen representative." Voldemort said, trying again, with far more patience than Rahkesh had thought him capable of.

"It is interesting that none of the more radical light groups requested to have their own representative, yet the dark wizards did." Minister Stocklir mused. "And I only received eight such letters. I would have better support for appointing a random person off the street."

Voldemort's calm façade cracked just a bit as he actually hissed. Dark magic cloaked him, invisible but almost suffocating nonetheless.

"So the voices of the dark community will be repressed…and yet many among you have no official posting and no backing of any sort…you have people present here who will have influence over what decisions are made, and no political authority at all to make them…I see a serious flaw here."

Minister Stocklir turned to look at the humans in apparent confusion. Every representative had a reason for being chosen. "Who here are you talking about?"

Voldemort finally moved, a few long strides brought him level with Alastor Moody, who wrinkled his nose as if smelling something nasty. Voldemort continued until he stood a few feet from Rahkesh.

In spite on having expected this Rahkesh was still unnerved, hoping, praying, that Voldemort would not sense anything unusual. He turned in a slow fluid motion, to face Voldemort directly. His complete merge with his basilisk form allowed him to smell Voldemort's fury, and the hiss of the other basilisk's magic. Had Rahkesh been paying any attention to the watchers he would have noted their curiosity at similar way he and Voldemort moved, gliding as much as walking, giving away their snake magic in their movements. Voldemort's eyes glowed briefly and Rahkesh felt a subtle shift in parselmagic. He let his own magic do the same and air filled with a tang of venom.

_You follow a light witch like a dog. You are a parseltongue! A dark being of great power, by all rights our kind ought to be LEADING this gathering! Have you no pride?_ Voldemort asked, approaching closer. Rahkesh didn't back up. He sank into the parselmagic and let it loose, flowing smoothly around him. He found his basilisk-self raised its magics. Voldemort was forced to stop as the rising wave of magic coiled around Rahkesh. Rahkesh gritted his teeth for a moment then relaxed his jaw. His parselmagic was shrieking now and Rahkesh was desperately struggling not to give any visible evidence of how difficult it was not to transform and attack on the spot.

_Have you? You disgrace our kin with your little movement. _Rahkesh replied. In the back of his mind a furious reptile was starting to fight. The basilisk was being stirred into a frenzy by the proximity of another. Rahkesh forced himself to stay calm and not grind his teeth as he fought back the instinctive violent reaction.

_I! I am the last heir of the great Salazar Slytherin. I disgrace no one. I follow the path of the greatest of our kind. We are parseltongues, born of the greatest magic and thereby destined for glory. _

_Whose glory? You act alone as a dictator. Whose power do you speak of? The creator of our kind meant for us to be healers. You create chaos, refuse justice, murder at a whim and would rule the world. _Rahkesh accused furiously. His own eyes were glowing now, gold. And blue magic began to shimmer about him. _Go give your recruitment spiel to someone more gullible._ Rahkesh said, _I will not hear it. We, cousin, can never have a peace between us for I will never follow your ways. _He turned away, towards the open field in front of the Conclave buildings. The basilisk screamed at having an enemy at its back. Voldemort whirled and followed, two quick steps and he was in front of Rahkesh again.

_Fine then. You too will fall when the time comes. This world is mine. I had thought to give you a place, perhaps as my second. I see now you are too addicted to the rule of these weak minded fools for that. But, perhaps, others are not so. Tell me, what of the third?_

Rahkesh pretended not to understand. The third was obviously the one Voldemort thought was the third parseltongue with a basilisk form – Harry Potter. And he thought Rahkesh might know something about him. Rahkesh had already decided that he would deny that Harry Potter was a basilisk – to difficult to manage – but that he would make sure Voldemort thought that Potter might have the potential to become one. That would leave Rahkesh some room to maneuver as any basilisk sightings might be attributed to his much hated alter ego. Rahkesh counted to ten, time to figure it out, then he allowed realization to show on his face and responded.

_I have not met him. He contacted me about the book. We corresponded by owl. However, his not yet the third. Get your facts right._ Rahkesh hissed coldly. Then he turned away, slowly and deliberately, to face the watching humans.

"I hope you will not take this megalomaniac as an image of the world's parseltongues." Rahkesh said tiredly, walking back towards them. The effort to act calm and saddened gave him an instant headache. "World domination and a ruthless dictatorship are not on anyone else's agenda, just his." He said, almost sadly. "And as for his fitness as a representative – you were right to ignore him." Minister Stocklir raised an eyebrow and Rahkesh continued. "For, surely, his insanity disqualifies him…we can smell it…insanity I mean…in each other's magics." He added carefully.

"You weak-minded fool!" Voldemort snarled at him, at them. "Demons about to invade and yet you sit here and think that you can refuse the greatest dark wizard alive?"

"Pretentiousness is also not a normal parseltongue characteristic." Rahkesh sighed.

"Enough of you!" Voldemort roared.

"Oh give it a rest. You haven't yet said what you could possibly contribute." Minister Stocklir snapped irritably.

"You go too far." Voldemort warned, now deadly calm. Rahkesh sent a quick warning to the Ateres in the form of a sharp magic burst. Next Minister Stocklir would probably…

"No, you do. Quit wasting our time. When a plan has been made you can be sure you and yours will have a part. You will contacted then with your role." Yeah, about what he'd expected and the response from Voldemort could be predicted as well…

"Contacted with my – AVADA KEDAVRA!" Yep, pretty standard.

Minister Stocklir ducked so fast she almost blurred. The green spell flew past where she had been. Shouts of fury echoed from the watching species. The first rank of humans spread out; from behind them the others began their attack. The humans spread, falling into a circle around Voldemort and his death eaters. The death eaters moved fast to create a semicircle behind their lord.

Blue light crackled over the grass and rolled back, revealing scores of death eaters hidden under cloaking spells. Half of the human representatives reversed to attack them. Red spells flying in a wave from their wands. Sparks flashed overhead, Rahkesh ducked and dodged out of the center of the fight. The representatives formed groups and split to go after the death eaters, who were trying to hold a line. Rahkesh found the other humans who were not actual representatives and joined them. Behind him purple tinged magic burst across Voldemort's shields. Then everything turned to chaos as the representatives and the death eaters dissolved their formations into battle. Weapons came out beside wands.

The non-representatives were moving away from the fight, under orders not to interfere. Rahkesh went his own way, flicking lightning bolts at nearby death eaters. In the center Minister Stocklir had a team with her, snapping any enemy shield spells that went up. The death eaters finally broke away from using shields and attacked without them. Magic blasted back and forth and the screams of the injured began to rise above the fight.

Before his eyes Rahkesh saw death eaters have their internal organs ripped out of their bodies, brains came crashing out of skulls and limbs tore off to go sailing across the field. The representatives were fighting dirty. One of the few legal spells he saw was a single summoning spell, used to tear wands from the hands of several death eaters. One of Minister Stocklir's guards caught a death eater with a drying spell and shriveled him into a mummified husk. Powdering spells from someone who was probably a potions master reduced two death eaters to lumps of dry dust. Nearby a representative fell, a killing curse ending his life. Rahkesh tore a cruciatus curse off another one. The death eaters were being typically predictable.

Voldemort, several death eaters keeping everyone out of his way, went after Minister Stocklir. Killing curses flying towards those surrounding her. Yellow flames raced across the ground then leaped high to encircle Voldemort. Seconds later he broke through, walking right through the fire, blue magic glowing about him. Minister Stocklir backed up, Voldemort moved forward…and stepped right into a trap.

Runes blazed across the grass. The designs flashed and spiraled outwards from where Voldemort stood to create a large circle. The interlocking rings and symbols hidden beneath a concealing spell came to life in a fiery roar of magic. Voldemort screamed as long tendrils of magic flowed out of the ground to wrap around him. His death eaters charged, slashing movements of their wands throwing magics at the runes, trying to break him free. The magic tightened its grip. The human representatives vanished in a snap, portkeys activating.

The ground blew up. The explosive roar of the magic went crashing across the field and caused the non-human representatives to cringe. Earth exploded skywards and green fire ballooned out into a mushroom-cloud. Human bodies and chunks of earth slammed into the shields surrounding the other Conclave members. Rahkesh sensed Voldemort's position and added his own touch. Lightning surged down his arms and out through his hands, flying through the cloud of green magic and striking Voldemort, ripping away pieces of flesh.

Minister Stocklir appeared, unharmed beside him. "Thread magic attack wards. We keyed them to the dark mark."

"Nice. But I think he's going to -" Rahkesh was cut off as the green fire and smoke washed aside. Snake magic hit Rahkesh's senses and he stumbled.

Out of the green mass lifted the head of an immense basilisk. Gleaming red eyes snapped open in the black and green scaled head.

"European black-scale." Rahkesh gasped out, identifying the basilisk sub-species instantly from the stored information in the parselmagic. He was shaking as he fought with his snake magics to not transform. The basilisk was reacting badly, practically going into magical seizures at the proximity of another basilisk.

The green magics glanced harmlessly off Voldemort's scaled body even as his death eaters died screaming around him. Twisted and rolling he turned his killing gaze on the representatives. Rahkesh moved fast and conjured wandlessly, forming a black cloud between Voldemort and everyone else.

Voldemort lunged through the cloud, two representatives dropped to the ground, dead. Spells crashed past Rahkesh's head. Voldemort, in snake form, managed to conjure a shield. Spells sparked in the air around the basilisk as Voldemort began casting wandlessly. Black fire shot from around him into the representatives. Killing curses followed, done wandlessly. Rahkesh focused a one of Voldemort's fangs shattered into splinters.

Suddenly Voldemort's skin ripped open and began to burn, scales shattered and fell, the basilisk writhed and rolled to cover the injured sections. Someone was using some seriously destructive magics, with no visible casting. Thrown around in a half-circle Voldemort raised his head and caught sight of the other representatives standing by the door. Spinning fast the basilisk struck. Not expecting an attack the hundreds watching scattered, but one of the veela moved too slowly. Voldemort's left fang sank all the way through her body. A second later he had turned and another fae, this one an Okata, fell, dead from the basilisk's gaze.

Magic tore through the crowd and the lights along the Conclave buildings went out. Representatives collapsed under the shrieking wave of black magic Voldemort hurled at them. The human countered, dragging back by glowing gold magic. Outnumbered Voldemort tried to take control of the golden magic, biting through some of the spells and sending bursts of power through others back to the creators. One of his eyes began to bleed and spells struck his head, leaving gaping smoking black pits in his scales. Fire roared across the field, burning the injured areas. Next came actual killing curses followed by bone shattering spells and intestine exploding ones. Rahkesh joined in again, forced by his own snake form into fighting in some way. Lightning ripped and clawed at the immense snake shooting the length of his body and making him convulse helplessly. The others took advantage and a barrage of spells actually lifted Voldemort off the ground and spun him over backwards. Basilisk blood sprayed into the air from torn arteries and burning scales shattered.

With a scream and a last blast of black foaming magic Voldemort vanished, having apparated while in his basilisk form.

XX

"Nine dead," Silas said, entering the massive hall soundlessly and taking a seat in the back row beside Rahkesh. "And countless death eaters…ahem…cannon fodder."

"How many fae?"

"Three. And one of them was ours." Silas said with a grimace. "Ours" meant a fae trained at Akren, as the alumni and students thought of themselves as a group that all belonged to as much as they did their individual species.

"Death eaters?"

"Sixty-two dead, five injured and captured." Silas said, Nuri took the seat next to him and rubbed his head against Silas shoulder. "Do you think he survived?" He asked, clearly thinking about Voldemort.

"Yes. We haven't finished finding all of the horcruxes yet." Rahkesh said, having long since told his friends all about his work with Alastor Moody. "He was hurt, really bad. Basilisks might be tough but that level of damage would kill a normal one fast. He's probably got a few healers around, but I expect he'll be healing from this for weeks. And he won't be able to transform again for at least a month, maybe more."

"How's Sharahak doing?"

"Very well." Rahkesh said, looking back to the distant stage in the center of the circular meeting hall, where Sharahak was standing. Rahkesh had occasionally checked up on him telepathically. He couldn't tell if Sharahak could actually feel it when he did that. Probably not. The link between them was mostly one way. But Sharahak would sense it if Rahkesh tried hard enough. Right now the ex-vampire was feeling fine and engaged in the discussion about demon healing abilities. Rahkesh had gotten in the first question, the one he'd been given from professor Zavens. Now he was just watching and listening, and trying to think of some way to out-fight the demons.

With the fight over Minister Stocklir had wasted no time in sending off the injured and getting everyone else back to work. The buildings had suffered no damage during the battle. While the news people outside reported on the deaths and what had happened the representatives were already in the middle of what was going to be a day-long meeting with Sharahak. Sharahak's written report had been sent around. It detailed everything he knew about the different types of demons, fighting styles, weapons, and magics. The rest of the day would be spent answering questions.

"How do you feel?" Silas asked.

"Shaky." Rahkesh replied. Silas had undoubtedly sensed his erratic pulse. His basilisk magics were _almost _calm, and he felt like he might be nearing the end of whatever his snake-self was going through. His magic felt different. After being stressed by the urge to fight and kill for so long it felt weird to not be constantly battling for self control. "I think I'm getting back to normal again."

"I thought it would take a full week." Silas said.

"Maybe not, I don't really know anything about basilisk territoriality, that part of the parselmagic knowledge I lost. Maybe it's not that long." Rahkesh said with a shrug. As long as it was over…he wouldn't have to worry about his snake-self until spring. Assuming of course he lived that long. Right now there were much more important things. "How have the interrogations of your prisoners been going?"

"Not so well." Silas replied, "we're interrogating them separately and then looking for consistencies between them. I think they're mostly lying now. There are truth potions that work on demons, Sharahak gave us them, but we need to find stuff to substitute in for substances only found in the demon realm. Right now we're just talking to them. Most of them are trying to play it tough and stay silent. Of course we need Sharahak at every conversation to translate."

"No one else knows their language?" Rahkesh asked. Only being able to talk to one at a time would be tedious and might hurt their ability to get the truth out of the prisoners.

"No. Namach says he and a few linguists will learn it as soon as he can access the memories he took from their leader during the battle in Mexico. That one must have been more powerful than he thought; he still can't access the memories. He's switched to a more powerful pensieve designed to deal with the excess magic from stolen memories. He estimates another two days at least, unless he just brute-forces it and reads them the way they are. He might to that, he's getting impatient."

"The representatives from different species are meeting tonight. Will you be going?" Rahkesh asked. He would have guessed that Silas and Daray were far too junior for something like that. But they were the two vampires who had the most involvement with the demons, and Cyala probably wanted to show off.

"I don't know. Daray will be; he's been acting as the go-between as the family prepares to work with Lord Hadrian to find any more portals in his territory."

"Uh-huh." Rahkesh muttered, having been around vampires long enough to know that any sort of decisions for allowing a large force of vampires onto another's territory would probably involve a lot "negotiations" – meaning sex. "Daray doesn't mind?"

"Thunder this is Daray we're talking about. He is, in case you missed this, the _perfect_ stereotypical vampire." Silas said dryly. "Besides, he chose the assignment."

"Figures." Rahkesh said. A rustle of magic shimmered before them. Rahkesh reflexively caught the letter as soon as it materialized. He flipped it open, guessing correctly that it was from the school. "All the students at Akren are doing a joint training session tomorrow, starting an hour before sunrise."

Silas groaned, "great, the worst possible time." Rahkesh chuckled, the vampire students would be feeling exhausted right about then as the daylight started to send them to sleep. He looked around for Daray, who was near Sharahak, sitting beside the stage in the front row, and keeping an eye on the other demon.

Rahkesh felt a stir of darkness behind him, raising the hairs on his neck. He lowered his mental shields and checked, the deep black rumble in the magic identified the being. _Now?_ Rahkesh asked silently. Namach's sub-vocal magical growl was his only response. _Very well_. He clapped Silas on the shoulder and left the hall.

Just outside the doors Namach's magic caught him. The vampire was nowhere in sight but the magic was unmistakable. Rahkesh let it teleport him, and found himself instantly in Namach's palace-like sitting room at Akren.

"Not at the Conclave?" He asked, seeing the vampire sitting in a comfortable old jewel-encrusted silk-covered armchair.

"I sent my golem. Memory transfer and mind division." Namach said, waving to one of the couches. Rahkesh sat down slowly as he thought that through.

"You've split your mind to focus on two places at once, then used the golem to act a receiver and transmitter because of the distance…with a constant link back to you despite its partial autonomy?" He finally said. Namach grinned broadly.

"_Very_ good." The vampire purred happily.

"What linking method?"

"Threadmagic. Actually it's a bloodmagic variation of threadmagics. Very specific threads soaked in my blood. The golem is held together by them and its brain processes, while controlled the normal way through copying my mind, are limited and defended by the same."

"And the threadmagic center is located inside so the golem so it can't be destroyed." Rahkesh finished. Just because he couldn't perform threadmagic hadn't stopped him from studying how it was used.

"Correct."

"Doesn't that imply a time limit before the normal body-magic interrupts it? I know being dead you don't have to worry about the infections and stuff a mortal would but the dead magics vampires run off of have to affect that." Rahkesh asked.

"Bloodmetal crystal-structure containment." Namach said. Finally surpassing what Rahkesh could follow.

"Huh?"

"You'll get there eventually." Namach said with a grin. "If you live long enough, at that point it becomes a matter of having enough time in your life to perfect the techniques."

"Which is why there has never been a human Grandmaster Bloodmage." Rahkesh sighed. All of those had been the longer-lived species. Few human made it into even the lowest ranking of bloodmages, fewer with each advancing level (there were three levels) and no one had managed that final step.

"Blood connections take time to develop and they're awfully finicky. Speaking of bloodmagic connections, how stable is Sharahak?"

"He's fine. Great even."

"So you can check on him?"

"Yes, and no I don't think he can tell when I'm doing it."

"I thought it might be that, but it's good to know. Do you have to deliberately look?"

"Yes. I have to find our connection again every time."

"Good. If it was anything stronger I'd be worried. At that level anything bad happening to one of you could seriously harm the other. Or, since you're human, kill you."

"And it might interfere with any soul magic I need to do." Rahkesh added, bringing the discussion around to his present dilemma.

"Which would be what?" Namach asked.

"The soul is an entire piece of energy correct?" Rahkesh asked in return.

"Correct."

"But he and I wound up switching small bits of our souls. So while technically he has six horcruxes, plus what he still has, and one of those gaps was filled in by my soul."

"True."

"And the soul covers the entire body. Break off a piece and there will be a vacuum until the rest fills it in. As more is removed the remainder is stretched thinner to cover everything. So if I kill the piece of Voldemort's soul that_ I_ carry, the vacuum created will pull whatever I'm missing back from him."

"But then he'll have an equal pull on that piece of soul."

"Yes, so I kill off that piece of my own soul once it's mostly free of his grip. That leaves him with just 1/7th of a soul, possibly too little."

"It might be enough. I've been looking through my old libraries, I do have a dusty old record from eight hundred years ago of a fool who created eleven horcruxes. All of them died simultaneously when he created the last, not enough in any one piece to keep his body and magic stable."

"But it is rare for someone to manage that many."

"Very. The six other records I found of humans creating more than five horcruxes, all of them died. That one was a rather interesting anomaly. Interesting enough that I stole his body, magic, and soul to study them," Namach said with a grin. "His soul managed to do what it did by pulling his magic and turning it directly into soul energy. When he went and tried to create the eleventh horcrux he was already almost a squib."

"Well even if Voldemort does survive he will be weak and no longer immortal in any sense."

"And you will be missing a small fraction of your soul."

"Which Necromancers give up anyway." Rahkesh finished. To become a true necromancer the person had to go to the point of death and deliberately leave a tiny, very tiny, piece of their soul on the other side. The permanent connection enabled them to contact the dead and do magic involving dead things. Such as animating bits of dead creatures and creating the monsters for which necromancers were famous on the battlefield. And when they died their soul just crossed over and the pieces flipped, usually, so that if the body was healed the necromancer could return. Then of course there were the problems with having your body dead for hours, no brain tissue lasted that long, but switching around bits of the soul again could revive and repair everything. That was what necromancers were truly infamous for – cheating death. But only the very best ever managed it.

"Necromancers, however, spend years very carefully selecting what that piece of their 'soul will be. Your soul contains all your memories; you don't want a copy of all of that in the dead realm, because there it is hard to defend. They also use only the smallest of fragments."

"The best necromancers use larger fragments."

"They don't cut that off all at once. When you leave some of your soul on the other side, deliberately, your magic will start generating new soul energy to fill the void. Then you can add to how much is on the other side over time. Leave too much behind the first time and you die, and you soul dissipates completely." Namach reminded him.

Rahkesh nodded, he knew that. There was a very good reason for it though, aside from what Namach had said. It took time to regenerate a soul. During that time a necromancer was hugely vulnerable. Any necromancer who died while still having a hole in the soul in this world would almost always die permanently. You only had a chance of returning if the soul was full.

"A risk I'll have to take." He said. "A simple killing curse should do for Voldemort. I've been practicing some, on rats, I can do it silently now. I can also set up a one-time illusion-projection on my wand so when I cast it he won't see it until it hits."

"Clever, very well that should work for him. Killing his soul fragment?"

"That will be harder. I'll need to use a killing curse again, in parseltongue. But I'll need to do it in my own mind, without harming myself. An inward killing curse I suppose."

"Ordinarily lethal, but if you direct it very carefully…you'll need to finish that magic focusing bloodmagic ritual first, possibly a second one as well."

"My only real problem is going to be killing my own soul. I think I can follow the path Voldemort's soul takes, then once across separate and leave the bit of mine behind. It should be coming to me, at a high speed, and should go right across into death without reconnecting with me."

"If you're very careful, yes, it could work. It isn't the proper technique but in this case the normal way would be even more dangerous." Namach agreed. "When?"

"After I'm done with those rituals."

"There will be some trouble between now and then." Namach said. "The fae are…upset at having three of their representatives killed. They're going after Voldemort's death eaters and have asked the vampires to stand aside. Hadrian agreed, he's got enough to deal with."

"And Voldemort will go after the fae. Ah well, I'm sure if necessary their Council can handle him." Rahkesh said dryly.

"They haven't contacted you?"

"No. The Vashora will probably give me a heads-up just for the fun of it."

"About them, have you had any dealings with the Vashora before?" Namach asked, and Rahkesh detected real concern. Why?

"No."

"Their interest in you is very odd. They almost never contact humans, or anybody else. I've never seen anything like it." Namach said. "And it isn't just to get one over the other fae either. They're genuinely interested in you and I can't find an explanation."

"They weren't too clear when I asked. Gave me a long speech about my potential."

"Which, while unique, is not enough of a reason."

"Yeah, and I'm not buying their bit about just being curious." Rahkesh replied. "Are they likely to be dangerous?"

"Couldn't find anything on their dealings with humans in the history section could you?" Namach asked, Rahkesh shrugged, he'd spent all night looking. "That's because they don't have any. Not publicly anyway, and rest of it is being kept very quiet."

"I love mysteries." Rahkesh muttered. "Is the bloodmagic knife-making seminar still on for tonight?"

"Yes. Xanthius will be there, and I'm sending my golem. I'll be busy with the vampires." Namach said, "you'll try to have a knife magically tied to you with you when you go after Voldemort?"

"Might need to improvise, use my bloodmagics creatively. If I get hit with anything while working with death magics I should be able to absorb or channel it around myself and off through my bloodmagic."

"I would not recommend it. You haven't done the bloodmagic specific to that task. It is possible, but you could wind up spending months recovering." Namach warned him, "assuming you survive."

"I always do, somehow." Rahkesh said with a grin. "And this one's easier than facing off against a pack of Inca warriors and demons. Voldemort I _know_, I can predict him, I can sense his magic, and I'm going to use our link to observe his mind. But not directly. I should know what he's going to do before he does it. And he _doesn't_ know me. Besides, we already know that electricity can be funneled across death and come back without changing." It was a discovery Rahkesh was immensely proud of. If he could study how it worked this ability of electricity might fundamentally change necromancy. But, more likely, it was another effect created by his thunderbird animagus and not applicable to anyone else.

Namach gave him an odd look. "What?"

"Remember Silas and Nuri's little experiment?" Rahkesh said with a grin. "If I get into trouble I'll electrocute Voldemort to death and use the electricity's rebound to bring myself back."

"I didn't think you'd caught onto that." Namach sighed. "I was hoping you wouldn't." For some reason he sounded tired. Rahkesh was confused; ordinarily Namach was overjoyed by any of his students doing something new. But this development did not please the ancient vampire at all. If anything he looked unusually troubled. Disturbed even, and even though the wards around this room were stronger than any Rahkesh had ever felt he could distantly sense them increasing in power as he had explained. Which meant Namach wasn't upset about just anything – he thought this was dangerous because of what someone else might do? Who? "Yes it is a possibility." Namach admitted, "but it's never been done before and the side affects, not to you but to others, are unpredictable."

"First time for everything right?" Rahkesh asked, more cautiously than happily. Namach's reaction to his idea was making him nervous. What could be bad enough, about his discovery of what his animgus's powers could do, to make the ancient so concerned?

"Just don't make the first attempt your last." Namach warned. "Let me know when you're going after Voldemort. If you do attempt to electrocute him across the life/death void then I want to be present, just in case you really mess things up on the other side."

_Not really._ Rahkesh thought, watching Namach's face. _You want to be present because something's going to happen. And not something going wrong magically. _The real question, he realized, was truly: _who has the ability to make __you__ actually afraid of their reaction to this?_ But that wasn't a question he was going to ask, because he knew it would not be answered.

-

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Please Review!

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I'm off on traveling for the next few months. And then out into the wilderness for two months after that. I will have limited internet access for the next couple of months, but I probably won't have time to write. I'll update as often as possible. Real Life does tend to get in the way of my writing.


	20. Chapter 20

Chthonius - I love it when people speculate about stuff in my fics, keep going.

Isis the Sphinx - yes there is a lot going on with this series that we haven't touched yet. This series is going places.

faithlessraine - good luck! I'll keep updating

Itallia - I decided that the different basilisk species would behave differently, Voldie is generally insane.

Sleepy Drago - I never said Rahkesh couldn't become a bloodmage! There's never been a human Grandmaster.

mandolii - anything involving Lucius would need a higher rating than allows. He belongs to Farov now.

Lilyyy - maybe they know, maybe they don't, at Akren you don't care and don't tlak about secrets

Cuervo Blanco - the canon cast will stop in occasionally, but they won't be around too much.

Raion - nope, yes Namach cares, but that's not the real reason, keep guessing! Ally will have her fun.

banner - the end of this trilogy is probably a year away yet.

Mondkalb - Severus will be around a bit. And yeah, scary idea. It's a scifi thing I came up with, then wrote the entire fic in order to work out what would happen if.

Garlak - great review. I like your thoughts. You're very thorough. You had a lot of questions, so: once Voldie is gone, he's gone, Rahkesh will eventually be speaking to dead people, you'll learn more about wands when Rahkesh makes his own, some bloodmagic changes can be permanent at the genetic level more on that later, origins of vampires and werewolves may come up - I have thought it out but I'm not sure if it will ever be really good timing to put those ideas in. Thanks for reviewing, keep reading!

The French Dark Lord - oh but if I published I'd have to deal with editors. I don't even like having a beta!

LanHikari200x - at this point he's at the "not ever" thing.

I don't usually reply to so many reviews, but it's been a while since I updated and it may be a long time until the next one, I don't know.

Much thanks to everyone for sticking with this these last few weeks. I'm traveling around out in the wilderness and I can only write when I get back to civilization. You have no idea how tough it is to find time to write when you can only occasionally recharge your computer batteries. Twelve thousand words in this chapter, I hope it keeps you busy for a while. I've got several vague and not-so-vague hints at the future in here.

X

Chapter 20

A basilisk fang, a thunderbird feather, one of Enireth's scales, a small phial of unicorn blood –willingly given of course – a few tail hairs from unicorns, thestrals, hippogriffs, fire horses, and pegasi. Veela hair, werewolf hair, a vampire fang, an Amadan fae's hair, a baku hair, fire salamander blood, Enireth's blood, basilisk blood, tears, and venom, the thunderbird's blood and tears, yeck fur, sygra's blood and some blood from her wyvern form, demon blood and demon scales, a tiny bit of phoenix ashes from one of the wild phoenixes, and albino eagle feather, animus bacca - leaves, pearls, roots, and sap, and some phoenix tears.

Rahkesh split the pile into two groups, rejecting some of them for this project entirely. He needed something closely bound to him, and very powerful. Anything from Yecks was out, along with anything from most of the other animals, and anything from a fae, werewolf, or demon. Thinking again he kept the phoenix ashes. Call it sentimentality for Fawkes, but Rahkesh had always had a thing for phoenixes. He did put aside the unicorn blood – he only had so much of it and he needed it for the maintenance of his bloodmagic knives.

"Now _that _is an impressive collection." Daray said, looking over Rahkesh's shoulder. Rahkesh went very still and put the knife, that he had reflexively drawn, away. He still hadn't figured out how the vampire was getting into his rooms. But he had yet to actually show any surprise, so Daray was cautious, wondering if he had figured it out.

Maybe, perhaps, for a little fun, he would sneak his improperly enchanted invisibility cloak into Daray's rooms. Just for laughs. But Rahkesh knew he'd never do it. It might actually maul someone. And of course Daray would figure out what it was, and then Rahkesh would really be in for it when the news got out that he'd messed up an enchantment that badly.

"You missed the knife-making seminar last night." Rahkesh said, turning around. "Professor Darkwind had some useful advice." Daray was wearing a blue and red silk top with a long open neck. Still-healing fang marks were clearly visible on his throat. And Rahkesh remembered that the vampires had been meeting the night before. "Had fun?"

"Oh yes." Daray said with grin. Rahkesh snorted and turned back to his work table, not wanting to hear about it. Daray was far too descriptive sometimes. "Lord Hadrian must have taken lessons from Tristan Namach; he fucks like a god." Rahkesh rolled his eyes, not caring in the least about the rumored sexual prowess of his professor. Daray could be outrageously predictable at times. Enough so that it was almost a running joke rather than an annoyance. Rahkesh was certain he just did it to get a reaction and to be amusing. Ally always called him on it just for the argument, Rahkesh just pretended (it wasn't much of an act) complete boredom.

"Please tell me I did not just hear that." Ally said, on cue, from the doorway. She had no actual objection – and they had all been treated to way to much information the last time Ally had had any sort of relationship – but playful arguing was always fun.

"Jealous sweetling?" Daray asked. Now that he probably meant, Rahkesh figured.

"Of someone who thinks sex with corpses is heavenly?" Ally asked back. Rahkesh's bark of laughter cut off whatever Daray was going to respond with. The common joke about vampires and necrophilia was almost cliché – as vampires were literally dead, but too true to give up.

"Use your feather as the center focus." Daray said instead, picking up the thunderbird feather. "OW!" He jumped back as sparks shot across it. Rahkesh smirked, feeling very smug. He took the feather, lovingly arranging it to ensure it hadn't been harmed.

"Dumbass." Ally said. "Put the feather inside the basilisk fang."

"When did you start working at bloodmagic?" Daray asked.

"I didn't. That was just logic and common sense. But now that you mention my advancing skills; I borrowed one of your notebooks." Ally replied smiling, "I'm taking the entry-level bloodmagic class next fall."

Well damn, Rahkesh hadn't expected that. Ally was tougher than tough on a bad day, and on a good one she could rip the eyes out of an elf. If she had any success at bloodmagic she'd be amazing. Though he suspected she was doing it not so much to become a bloodmage but to strengthen some other abilities. Her talents in other areas were too strong to switch to bloodmagic; she'd be giving up too much.

"If anything happened to that notebook…" Daray trailed off. Rahkesh could see he was really wanting to ask how Ally had gotten into his rooms, and out again, without being noticed or caught in any of his traps. Daray set his traps inside his rooms, thinking that if someone got past the wards he'd want to know who it was and so locking them in until he got back to deal with them was a smart thing to do.

"I was merely rescuing the sad little thing from having to sit on your shelf." Ally said gently. "Who knows what goes on in that room that the poor thing had to watch?" Daray opened his mouth to say something, Ally hurriedly continued, "and given how horrible your chicken-scratch is I could barely read it. How many pieces Rahkesh?"

"The feather is the center, and it will be inside the fang. But I need a liquid medium to fill in the gaps around the feather inside the fang. No air pockets." Rahkesh replied. Air would shatter the knife and probably kill him.

"Combine the two species blood" Daray said.

"Can't; there's some sort of reaction that I haven't quite figured out. Blows up something spectacular, generates immense electricity, then turns acidic and burns through almost everything but diamond." Rahkesh said. "Professor Strawlime and I had a horrid time containing the stuff. Until it all went and flash-vaporized. Strawlime wants some to practice with, but I'll not do it. Drawing blood from the thunderbird is hellish. And I don't like having any unused blood of mine floating around. Too unique and too dangerous."

Strawlime would be after him for the rest of his life, asking for another sample. The combination had been explosively powerful, but about as lethal as drinking raw dragon blood, more so, since someone (him) had actually survived drinking raw dragon blood. Rahkesh had been uncomfortable with the way the mix had not responded to him even though it had all originated with him. He kept a bond with everything else, from feathers and scale clippings, to tears and talon scrapings; if it was his he could feel it and manipulate it.

"I've been getting samples from myself to use in mine. I tell you scraping scales off is like fingernails down a blackboard." Daray said with a shudder. "And lets not start on trying to get a demon to cry – they don't do it well."

"What ritual do you need a specialized knife for?" Rahkesh asked. Daray would not undergo such an indignity for just any reason. He, oddly enough, was taking his new-and-much-improved demon-self with great pride. True the sleek black creature was impressive and strangely beautiful, in an almost-nightmareish way, but Daray just about strutted around when in demon form.

"Magic directing and focusing." Daray replied. "I've got the runes ready to go today, but the knife I need is proving problematic."

Rahkesh didn't respond, his runes were almost done; he'd had to wait until his basilisk got done being territorial before he could start them. If his difficulty continued it might actually start to even out – the break-neck pace he'd had as the basilisk got charged for battle, then the wait unable to do anything while it was doing it's yearly way-out-there hormones thing. Somehow Daray had actually managed to keep pace. Despite his months of agonizing troubles with his demon transformation he was still right beside Rahkesh as the best trainee bloodmage of their age group. Which was incredibly impressive, however, Rahkesh had done his first bloodmagic enchantment, on other people, and Daray wouldn't be doing his until the following week at least.

Not that that meant much. Rahkesh was not competitive about his bloodmagic, and certainly never with a friend. It wasn't a field that became competitive, not for those who wanted to live. Or at least not ever at their level. What was interesting to Rahkesh was that it seemed a little odd that there would be two students as naturally skilled as he and Daray in the same year. Especially since they had surpassed everyone in the two years above them and none of the new students were showing any early signs of ability. Perhaps they worked off each other. Maybe he should ask Namach about that, magic did a lot of weird things.

"Do you have to go to the Conclave today?" Ally asked.

"No. Not us anyway. It's almost over, what a week this has been! And I suppose now training will take over and we'll be even busier. There won't be anything new from the MLFC for a week or so. Now it's up to the military units to work things out." Rahkesh said.

"Professor Namach will be there all day. Xanthius is teaching." Daray told Rahkesh. "He is the Vampire King after all – if we had such a position."

"Which you don't because he killed the last idiot to suggest it." Ally said. "Better watch it with that."

"He killed that idiot because that vampire was one of the few to escape Namach's originally extermination of the old ones." Daray replied. "It had nothing to do with his outrageous suggestion, which was just an ass-kissing attempt to avoid being killed anyway."

"I'm still waiting for an explanation of why he went and killed off most of his own species in the first place." Rahkesh sighed, interrupting them.

"He doesn't need a reason." Daray snapped. Ally and Rahkesh traded shrugs and eye-rolls. Vampires were utterly incomprehensible at the best of times. "And he is in quite a temper over loosing time having to deal with Voldemort."

"The fae are also in a fuss over Voldemort." Rianae said, joining them. Rahkesh just blinked at her – the door had been closed. Rianae did occasionally get past his wards, and he had no idea how. It was probably threadmagic, which she knew he couldn't do.

"You look awful." Ally said. The morning training session had been perfect hell. After a 5k hike through the mountains with huge packs of rocks they had a not-so-refreshing swim through some whitewater rapids, followed by a series of maneuvering and spell coordinating drills and finally a mock battle that had resulted in nearly everyone getting injured. Rianae was still sporting blue and purple bruises. They all were, but Rianae had gotten attacked by a pack of werewolves on the opposing team. Seven to one was never pretty.

"Is Benjamin still in the medical wing?" Daray asked. Rianae had managed to give her attackers a severe beating.

"Yes." Rianae said smugly. "How's your shoulder Rahkesh?"

Rahkesh rolled his left shoulder around to show it was all right. It had been dislocated twice that morning, and he'd taken a knife deep into the shoulder muscle. That still hurt a lot. But the bleeding was done and it was scarred over already thanks to healing magics. "What are the fae doing about Voldemort?"

"Killing his death eaters. They may have abandoned a lot of the British lands but they didn't give them up. They're going back and using those areas to stage attacks."

"I'm surprised they left in the first place." Rahkesh said. "However bad it got over there I'm amazed they would back down like that."

"Apparently it wasn't them backing down. Well, not for all of them. Some of the smaller settlements genuinely felt unsafe enough to leave, especially the veela, they had an awful time. However for some of them, especially the Amadan, it was them using the situation as an excuse to leave without anyone being suspicious. They have a whole new set of offensive wards on their lands that needed them to be empty to complete." Rianae said, "but you didn't hear that from me."

"You and Justin must have the most interesting pillow-talk." Daray muttered, ducking instinctively to avoid a swipe from Rianae.

"Does he know you report back to your mother?" Rahkesh asked, genuinely curious. Vampires had round-about ways of communication that usually involved lots of sex. Channels for getting information about that were entirely unofficial, most of the time. Did fae act the same way?

"Of course." Rianae said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "The fae Council has also written up their message to you, Rahkesh, now they're just choosing someone to deliver it."

Rahkesh turned fully to look at her. The message was clear enough; Justin wished to know how it would go between Rahkesh and the Council. The Council's attack on Rahkesh had nearly killed him and had been an unprecedented breach of protocol. Most of the world might not know about it, but almost all fae did. The uproar had apparently been impressive. Haedil had once mentioned that some Council members had retired over it. Thought ought to have been enough to settle any young human. But Rahkesh was not so easily appeased. Rahkesh had refused to even acknowledge of any attempt at peace-making. Now Justin wanted to know in advance what was going to happen. Probably so that he could report it to his parents, or at least his mother, who was on the Council, and so she would be able to predict Rahkesh's response, and then say I-told-you-so when it turned out just as she had predicted.

"If it isn't a Council member I won't accept." Rahkesh replied, giving Rianae a hard look. She nodded. Justin would know Rahkesh's reply in maybe an hour, and the fae Council would an hour or so after that. Justin being a child of a Council member had its advantages. And maybe this would be over faster using such a back-channel.

XX

"Can anyone define Necromancy?" Namach asked the class. Rahkesh reminded himself, again, that this was a golem. Xanthius must have been busy. It was an amazing golem. Rahkesh had read up some on them. He would not have run out of fingers trying to count the number of beings currently capable of making one that could last longer than twenty-four hours. Never mind one so intact that it could perform most of its creators magics without intense direction. This one could really think. Most people who created them found that when a golem got to be too good it didn't want to die again and the creator and golem got into a fight until the golem's magics wore off. Many, many powerful enchanters had died, killed by their own golems. There were many other problems with golems, but that was the one that everyone feared. Apparently Namach did not have such difficulty.

"Incorporating dead magic into a functioning enchantment." Daray replied at once.

"And dead magic is?"

"Magic that has passed across the life/death barrier." Rahkesh replied. "And returned intact to its originator."

"The last part of that was the important part." Namach said, pacing in front of the room, his long black silk and velvet cape whispering across the floor. He must not have changed since the vampire gathering. The cape was always getting in the way of the blackboard. Fortunately Namach rarely used written notes. It was actually a circular room of soft armchairs with desks attached.

"The less magic that bleeds off on the other side the better it works. Leaving too much behind dilutes the spell until it is unstable. If it is all lost then the originator has an open channel taking their energy and killing it. Many necromancers have died because of that. They created a one-way connection and drained themselves right across it. Tight magic is the key to success. That is why magic focusing and directing bloodmagic rituals are so important. It is possible to function without them, but only barely and not to any great scale or intensity. It is also this danger that is why not one of you will intentionally get anywhere close to the life/death barrier until you can show me a silent, invisible, killing curse. Performed on a mammal of your choice."

Doing that spell would, for just about everyone, require the magic focusing ritual, or the magic directing one, or both. _Human?_ Rahkesh wondered, would Voldemort count? Namach's golem glanced at him with a brief look of amusement. Rahkesh sighed and closed down his mental shields again. This damn golem was _way_ too good. It made it hard, if not impossible, to tell which was the real Namach. Wouldn't it be funny if this was the real one, while the golem dealt with the undoubtedly tedious military negotiations?

The door opened and Professor Xanthius walked in. The entire class, including Namach, did a double-take at the sight of the elf – he was wearing blue jeans and a gray silk t-shirt. And elf wearing something like that was…like having a triceratops walk into the room…but even stranger. Like having a tree in a dress flounce in or, or maybe a goblin walking on his hands. Rahkesh immediately assumed he must have been out in the muggle world…but it was still bizarre to the extreme to see him in anything other than his usual robes or other elven scholarly clothing. His silk-like white hair was tied back into a long braid, but loose enough so that it hung on the sides and partly covered his pointed ears. Xanthius would never easily pass for human; like all his kind he was far too ethereal and other-worldly. But like this people would not immediately take him for another species.

"About time." Namach said in a growl. Xanthius just stared at him in a bored fashion.

"My superiors called me home for a briefing about our actions, or lack thereof, in the coming invasion." He replied. "Are you suggesting I should simply ignore the Elven Lords?"

"Yes. You ought to have told them you'd see them when your classes were done and you had the time. Or that you weren't able to go until later. You could always have blamed me – they would have believed that." Namach said with a sharp fanged grin. Xanthius laughed.

"Yes I imagine they would." Xanthius said. "They have only too much experience with your irreverence." Then he changed direction. "The Headmistress is calling meetings of different segments of the student population. Bloodmagic students of the class below this one, and all the ones above, along with necromancy students, are meeting in ten minutes."

"And anyone who specializes in more in than one thing?" Headil asked.

"Go to both meetings then. We're first so it won't be a problem." Namach said. "Might as well stop here. Main assembly hall in five minutes, all of you."

Rahkesh caught up with Daray and Haedil outside of the classroom to begin the long walk to the largest of the schools assembly halls. It was on the second lowest basement level. Only the advanced potions lab was lower. And because it was one of the more secure locations the assembly hall was also outside of the main school structure, inside a different piece of the enormous mountain that housed Akren. It was a long walk from anywhere else and connected to a massive underground complex capable of housing twenty times to student population for as long as might ever be necessary.

Each Akren graduating class added some element to the school's security structure. Most were offensive or defensive wards and enchantments. However, seven hundred years previously, twenty successive classes had built the subterranean secure bunker as a backup measure should anything truly catastrophic happen. There were entire orchards down there, under artificial lights, kept at full fruiting readiness in a suspended animation enchantment. Plus huge gardens and several types of livestock and even grazing area. It covered seven levels each the size of the entire base of mighty Akren Mountain. It was completely self-contained and theoretically indefinitely sustainable. Periodically students in the second to oldest class went down there to check on everything. They had been given classes off this week (except the morning training exercises) and were down there now preparing, running through checklists, and adding anything not kept in storage there.

"Will either of you be called home once the fighting starts?" Rahkesh asked the other two.

"Hard to say." Haedil replied, "in all previous wars fae students took their loyalty to Akren above all else. However those were mostly wars between fae tribes or the fae and the vampires. This is different. I don't think the Council has decided to ask us to return or not yet."

"Seems like the logical thing would be to leave you all here." Daray said, "Akren trained fighting with like comrades will do more good than with any other army."

"Probably. Are you going home?" Haedil asked. Daray shrugged uncomfortably.

"I don't think so. Silas and I are not yet Dark Angels and they family will be moving about a lot and we wouldn't fit in well yet. I think we're staying."

"Rahkesh it seems awfully likely that one or another human army will invite you to join." Haedil said. "You're better known than you think, you know. After that little thing with Voldemort anyone not aware was asking questions about you. You're unique among your own kind and extremely valuable. If they call you, will you go?"

"Absolutely not." Rahkesh replied. "Akren trained and Akren loyal. Besides I can do more with our fighters."

"None of you will be leaving." Nvara said, stepping from the shadows beside the doors of the hall. "Hurry up."

"And that settles that." Daray muttered, jumping down several rows of blue seats to get a good one. He need not have bothered. The hall was a semi-circle of steeply inclined rows. Everyone who was any good at bloodmagic was there, and they barely filled the first two rows of seats.

Nvara walked into the small open space left for a speaker. She placed a small bag on the table and picked out of it a red orb.

"Does anyone know what this is?" She asked, holding it up. The thing was a perfect circle of glassy red. It was shot through with streaks of white, silver, and gold and was glowing faintly.

"A Life Crystal." An older student answered, though no one else seemed to know.

"Very good. This is a device that allows you to pour some of your life energy – and I do hope you all know I'm not talking magic – into it. Your body then replenishes what it lost, while the saved piece remains in the crystal. Such devices are very rare and very sought after. You can have your head cut off, and if you have enough life energy in one of these you can release the life energy inside and expect, unless your head happens to be very far away, to have it reattach itself. And heal perfectly.

Now I know it is a breach of our ordinary curriculum but we are going to be ending all classes starting next Monday. Instead students will be assigned to training units and other duties related to preparing for war. For some of you this will mean working to create Life Crystals. We have, as of this afternoon, one thousand in the Akren store rooms. It takes some time to learn to make them, and not all of you will be able, but we are hoping to create another five hundred in six weeks."

"Five hundred." Daray whispered softly as the students broke out talking all around them. "And a thousand already created. I hadn't thought there were that many in the entire world."

"You know about them?" Haedil asked.

"Not really. Just how valuable they are." Daray said, "Grandmother found one in the home of one of her victims, she'd been hired to kill off a cult leader in Argentina. I remember how delighted she was to find one. She tries to have one for every family member by the time we're two hundred, but they're really hard to make and if they're not perfect then they don't last all that long, though the energy in them is transferable. I think Aelfly and Namach are being extremely ambitious if they think we can make five hundred in six weeks. It'll never happen. Unless Namach has some technique he's never published."

"That would not surprise me much." Haedil said. "How long does it take to make one?"

"No idea." Daray said, "I think it depends on the maker."

The headmistress returned to the center of the room and waited, glaring for silence.

"Now, I know that all ordinary security restrictions would forbid you from telling anyone about certain things you learn here. This time we're taking it a step further. Everyone will be undergoing a bloodmagic silencing enchantment so that you cannot tell anyone what you learn about making Life Crystals. Those of you who prove to be good at it and make it into the Bloodmages Guild will of course have this enchantment removed as soon as you complete those trials. Those of you who don't make it into the Guild will have your memories of this removed by forty years after graduation."

This got another round of whispers, some of then quite angry. To have an improved technique for something like this and not share it was, though certainly not illegal, at least regarded as an act of ill will. Namach just looked amused.

"Well of course he's not going to share it." Daray muttered. "It's far too much of an advantage."

"If he's letting any of us remember how to make them at all, even if we can't tell how, then clearly he's changed his mind." Rahkesh replied. "At the very least anyone who learns how will be able to increase the world supply of them. I suppose there will be various effects, some bad, some good, but apparently he's decided to go ahead with it."

"Besides, some of the effects can be replicated by drinking Black Verbena Tea every day." Headil said. "You do that don't you Rahkesh?"

"Yes." Rahkesh said, he didn't like the taste but the added reserves of healing life energy it gave over a long time were far to useful to pass up. "Should I be able to transfer more into a Life Crystal because of that?"

"It sounds logical, but maybe not depending on how they're created." Daray said.

"Enough." Aelfly finally said loudly, drawing immediate silence. "You'll all be starting on that soon so we can find out who will actually be part of that project. Next, will be a combined threadmagic and bloodmagic ward across the valley that registers everything going in or out. Insects to dragons we're going to have a record of all of it. Those of you competent with threadmagic will be helping with this." Rahkesh zoned out for the details of that project, since there was not even the remotest possibility that he would be involved.

"Our third project is one the more advanced necromancy students will be helping with." The headmistress said, "and possibly some of the beginner necromancers will be able to help as well. When this school was founded an army of…well dead things…was buried in vaults in the sides of the valleys. It was quite a project to get them in between the thermal vents of the hot springs. A few hundred years ago ten consecutive graduating classes sent their best necromancers to work on the cache. Several hundred skeletons were disassembled and recombined into things capable of being useful in battle. Over the next two months students will design more such creatures, and import whatever parts we don't have. You'll prepare them for animation and prepare the correct rituals to awaken them. Hopefully by the time the demons arrive we will have an army of undead…not beings…to fight for us." Aelfly said, pausing over some of the words. Putting together bits and pieces of different species to create a thing that had never existed, and then animating it, was very difficult work. Easier to use something that had actually lived. "We will also be adding to our army of actual dead creatures, currently held in vaults below the bunkers." Aelfly added. "More of you should be able to help with that."

"There are several other projects happening. Some of them you will be individually contacted and invited to help with. Many of them are things that we will not tell everyone about for this reason: those who don't know what our plans are cannot give anything away, accidentally or intentionally. Secondly and more importantly, we will soon be at war. At that time a lot of people are going to die, more will be captured. If you don't know what's going on you can't spill it to the demons under torture." Aelfly said, silencing any qualms anyone had had about the enhanced secrecy and bringing the meeting to a grim ending.

XXX

"Would a cooling spell mess this up?" Rahkesh asked Professor Darkwind. Professor Darkwind was a Second Tier Bloodmage of the Black Order, and a Master at Metalmagics. He refused outright to teach bloodmagic, but he taught all of the classes on mineral, gemstone, and metal-based magics. This included putting threadmagic into gems and metal, along with enhancing metals and gems with potions or preparing metal or gemstone containers to hold certain potions. He sometimes substituted as a teacher for the bloodmetal making classes, but the only bloodmagic related class he taught was the one to make the knives essential to bloodmagic.

Professor Darkwind turned from a long sword he was repairing. It was supposed to contain a threadmagic enchantment against breaking, but someone must have messed that up pretty good. It was a twisted lump of smoldering magic-spitting silver.

"Yes." Professor Darkwind didn't talk a whole lot.

Rahkesh shrugged off his shirt instead. The forge rooms were enormous, but size didn't help when there were few windows and the heat coming off the twenty or so ongoing projects was enough to roast in. Having more windows would not have helped; they were spelled to not allow actual breezes in, lest some bit of air blow things around or interfere with something.

Professor Darkwind, a huge man missing the middle finger of his right hand, seemed immune to the heat. Of course, he was from Mexico. Rahkesh, born and raised in Britain, didn't handle heat nearly so well. The eleven students who were seriously studying metal magics were moving around. Apparently used to the temperature. It was not a popular area of study, fascinating though it was. This was because the goblins innate talents meant that they did better than almost anyone else and got the best jobs. Professor Darkwind was the exception. He had studied with the goblins, spoke all their languages better than his own, and managed to create projects that amazed even the best of their metalworkers. Akren's goblin-werewolf hybrid was not far away. Coaxing a twisting metal staff to accept the threadmagic-filled gemstones he was putting into it. Rahkesh watched as the rubies vanished into the staff, unable to figure out what magics were being used.

The knife Rahkesh was preparing didn't have a single metal component. But the rooms designed for those making knives for bloodmagic were located next to the massive Akren workshops and forges. The reason they were here was because of Professor Darkwind.

Rahkesh returned to the room he was using. A tiny closet of a room with a stone work table and no chairs, and a ceiling designed to collapse in and destroy everything in the room if anything went wrong.

The basilisk fang made up the blade of the knife. He'd carved it into a blade shape and worked bloodmagic runes for stability and strength on it. The runes were fully magical – Rahkesh had taken it up to one of the bloodmagic chambers earlier and run his magic and blood through them. This had left a permanent coating of shiny red blood inside the runes. The result was a white bone blade with bright red runes along its length. He had not added an extra material for the grip, leaving the entire thing bone. Rahkesh had wrapped runes around the grip in an attempt to preserve the knife. Most knives used in the two rituals he wanted this one for were completely destroyed by the end. He wanted this one to be one of the ones that lasted.

The blade was open at the back end, and the thunderbird feather was inside. Rahkesh had been spelling it so that it wasn't damaged or folded too much when the heat had finally gotten to him. Now he returned to it and, touching the end sticking out just a little, sent a shockwave down the feather.

He had decided to fill the extra space in the knife with simple human blood. His of course, but human blood all the same. He had mixed in one drop of the tears of each of his animal forms. They balanced out chemically. Tears tended to be emotionally charged substances, or simple magic conductors. Rahkesh had mixed in his blood to give them life. While bloodmagic often relied on instinct it could also be learned. Mixing in blood and tears given during meditation gave the knife stability and a strong connection to him. Calm mediation meant that the tears were stable and not as reactive. The tears from both his animal forms would be useful in a different way. He performed bloodmagic as a human, and as such it was extremely difficult to use in his other forms. Having the tears of those species, mixed with magically charged blood, might help him to use any bloodmagic done with it in his animal forms. Rahkesh poured the mixture into the knife, and then used a summoning spells to remove any air left around the feather.

Rahkesh capped the back end of the knife with a small piece of thunderbird talon. This too had runes on it, and when he closed it and the basilisk fang together the runes lined up. Rahkesh let out a sigh, he'd spent hours measuring those be sure that they would work. He gripped the knife by the blade until his palms cut and blood began to flow. Finding both his animagus and snake forms Rahkesh pulled on that magic, then on his bloodmagics. His skin began to glow with runes and he heard the basilisk's hiss and the thunderbird's scream in his mind. Rahkesh sent the magic into the runes, flowing through each of them, pulling his blood with it. The runes filled with blood. The blood began to spark and shimmer and turned into thin ropes that twisted smoothly through every rune.

Certain that the knife was sealed and completed Rahkesh poured electricity into it, charging the feather and the liquids inside until the knife began to vibrate with magic. Then he took out a small phial of his venom, taking from his basilisk form, and washed the knife in it. Slowly he closed the cuts on his palms and withdrew his magic.

The runes were no longer deeply carved into the knife. Now they were filled with bright red blood, shot through with barely visible sparkling lines of electricity, frozen in the blood. The blood had filled the runes to a level with the blade, making the knife's length smooth as glass.

Rahkesh put the knife in the simple leather sheath he had made earlier. Nothing special was needed for this blade, except it would need to be re-charged and connected to him before every ritual.

Rahkesh was on a bit of a role; he had finished his rune preparations for both the magic focusing and magic directing rituals the night before. Deciding that he was in the right mindset to be doing bloodmagic he had started on his knife hours before dawn and signed up for the next open slot for the chamber he had picked out the previous evening.

He was hoping to finish both rituals before he took on Voldemort. However, with the fae attacking Voldemort's death eaters Rahkesh guessed that it was only a matter of time before Voldemort and the fae got into a real fight. At that point, should any fae from Akren be injured or killed, Rahkesh would be obliged to kill Voldemort. Not because anyone would require it, but because that was just what those trained at Akren did for each other. Rahkesh was the only one capable of killing Voldemort, therefore whether or not he would feel honor-bound to kill him for harming one of the Akren's fae was his decision, and only his.

And deciding to kill Voldemort would certainly go far in showing off the basic loyalty that graduates and students of the world's top school of magic had to each other. The fact that it would really put a dent in the Fae Council's pride was just an added benefit. They still hadn't contacted him, and Rahkesh was getting damn tired to their little disagreement.

His knife finished Rahkesh left to find Professor Darkwind. He found him supervising the creation of a set of enchanted necklaces.

"Well?" Professor Darkwind asked. Rahkesh handed over the knife. And immediately had to fight down an urge to grab it back. That was the problem of making a blade completely from himself – he was strongly connected to it.

Professor Darkwind carefully examined the blade. Turning it around, then creating a small light to examine it by. He balanced it on a finger, scratched at it with a nail, and carefully touched the runes – which sparked and shocked him. After two minutes, which only seemed like a half hour to Rahkesh, he handed it back.

"That is…most impressive." Professor Darkwind said slowly, watching Rahkesh sheath the blade. He paused, searching for words. "This was your first attempt at creating a knife for bloodmagic?"

"Yes."

"Amazing." Professor Darkwind breathed, his cold exterior finally fading. "That is incredible. I have never seen anyone produce such a blade on their first attempt." Rahkesh detected a flicker of awe on Professor Darkwind's face before he continued. "That knife could channel your entire magical content with breaking. I bet you could even convert it for use in necromancy." He eyed the blade for a moment longer, and then met Rahkesh's eyes. "That knife will not be destroyed during either of your rituals. In fact, that knife may survive almost any ritual you attempt to use it for…if you use for ones it _can_ work with. Look after that knife; it may well survive as long as you do. But it will disintegrate with your death." A small smile finally appeared as Professor Darkwind grinned at Rahkesh. "Tristan said you were talented. I think, perhaps, he has underestimated you."

Rahkesh left the workshops, feeling a little uneasy about the metalmagic students, who had probably been listening, and were now watching him closely. He stopped to leave the knife and the leftover bits of basilisk fang in his rooms. Then went to find the others in the dining hall.

Daray met him on the way down. "Did you sleep at all?" He asked.

"No. I finished my rune sets and my knife." Rahkesh said.

"Nice. Got mine done yesterday evening. You should have seen Professor Darkwind's face when the handle went and _bit_ him." Daray grinned. Rahkesh had to laugh.

"With miniature fangs right?"

"Beautiful ones too." Daray said cheerfully. "I used my own."

Rahkesh turned to stare at Daray as he chose a seat. "You removed your own fangs to use in your knife?"

"Worked too." Daray said.

"Did it hurt much?" Defanging was the threat Rahkesh usually used with vampires. Hitting a vampire on one of their fangs would usually make them just about scream in pain.

"Yes." Daray said, giving a Rahkesh an annoyed look. "Of course it hurt. Getting castrated would probably hurt less."

"Worth it?"

"More than." Daray said smugly.

"Do we not have any training this morning?" Ally asked, sliding into a seat next to Rahkesh at breakfast.

"Cancelled, or just delayed." Rahkesh replied, pointing to a notice on the doors. "No reason given."

"Nice of them to give us a day to recover after that last session." Justin said.

"Whenever I hear someone saying that the Professors are going easy on us, I always have this urge to run." Rahkesh said, "because they would never go easy on us. If they appear to then there must be some major catastrophe that requires their attention."

"I hate it when you get prophetic." Silas said, nodding upwards.

The heavy beats of hundreds of wings brought all heads up. Owls were flooding into the hall, every one grasping a newspaper.

"Damn." Daray said, a solid black owl landing on his shoulder. Satan, present despite the daylight, shrieked and bit. "Stop that." Daray muttered at his bat companion. "He thinks every other winged creature is competition."

"Daray, Silas." Justin said, tapping the paper he was holding. Daray stopped reprimanding his familiar and paused to read, his eyes going wide. Silas leaned over his shoulder, then simply took the paper Rahkesh handed him. Rahkesh waited patiently.

"Some of the family located our missing demons last night. They were in a cave in Scotland. Our best estimate was five or six of them – based on the number known to be in the this world and unaccounted for." Daray finally said, speaking rapidly as he summarized the article. "Grandmother sent in eight of the family, backed by fifty of Lord Hadrian's vampires, to get rid of them."

"And?" Rahkesh asked.

"There were thirty-eight demons. Two adults." Daray said. "Our family killed twenty of them, one was an adult. Lord Hadrian's vampires got ten. The rest escaped. Damn. There're still seven subadult demons and one full adult around somewhere."

"I think the important point is that our estimate was no where near the actually number." Rahkesh pointed out. "That means we have no real idea of how many demons are in our world right now."

All around the hall people were reading of the fight in Scotland, and shooting questioning looks at the two Ateres cousins. Dead demons was always good news. Having not even the faintest clue how many there actually were in the world was really bad news.

"Your parents?" Rahkesh asked. Daray shrugged, flipping the page. Apparently no one had bothered, or thought, to mention the plans to the two youngest family members. But, from what Rahkesh had seen of the Ateres operations, this was not unusual. Cyala kept track of everyone, with only maybe one other family member always aware of where everyone was and what they were doing (just in case something happened to Cyala). It was not uncommon for several of the family to be off on different missions that were absolutely secret.

"Somehow I don't think this is what is delaying our practice." Silas said.

"No it is not."

The group spun to find Professor Namach near them. Or, rather, what was probably his golem. Rahkesh hadn't heard through the Akren grape-vine if Namach had returned from the Conclave, or if the military coordination would take another day. As usual no one had noticed his approach. Namach ignored them all and focused in on Rahkesh.

"What is?" Haedil asked.

"Nothing that concerns you." Namach replied, not looking at him, to Rahkesh he asked "are you able to move that magic focusing ritual up a few hours?"

"Yes, sure." Rahkesh said, confused, the chamber he needed was booked for several hours yet by another student.

"The chamber is being cleaned. You can start in a half hour. Better get moving, you have that chamber until midnight." The vampire said, turning away towards the staff table, he paused, turning one shoulder, "Bill Bartman is dead."

"Ha." Haedil said, turning to the table next to them. One of the werewolves there swore and handed over a small leather bag.

"What was he doing?" Rahkesh asked.

"Dumbass is one class behind us." Haedil said, "Rather he _was_. He went and tried a two-stage magic shielding ritual. Everyone knows you can't even think about doing that until you've got a foundation on magic directing and focusing. Stupid shit thought he'd found away around that. Wanted to make a name for himself I guess."

"Dumb or not he was still one of ours. Given that we're going to war I would not be so pleased to see anyone dying right now. We need everybody, even if it's just as cannon fodder." Rahkesh said coolly. Pushing back his chair he grabbed his books, his other professors would probably understand if he missed class. He needed to go home briefly before he began his ritual, Regulus was leaving and Rahkesh wanted to see him off.

"Guess I'll be seeing you later than." Daray said with a grin, "I'm starting my ritual in three hours. Good luck."

"Luck and bloodmagic do not mix." Rahkesh replied, quoting Namach. It was a line their Professor used an average of twenty times per semester per class, as calculated by Haedil and Benjamin. It was becoming something of a tradition to quote it. The others laughed as Rahkesh hurried off.

XX

Lights flashed off the walls and a body hit the floor with a loud echoing thud. Red slitted eyes glared at the still form for a moment. Then jerked away towards the other masked people in the room.

There were few of them left. In retrospect going to the Conclave and attempting to force the issue had been a costly mistake. And, worse, no new recruits. Too many had died during the worst of the plague, which now, thank Merlin, was winding down as people isolated themselves, it would burn itself out soon. Even more problematic was that the public had stopped caring about blood issues. The extremist Light movement hadn't cared to start, and now the demons were more of a concern. Anyway the purebloods had been hard hit by the plague – many muggleborns had simple vanished into the muggle world and survived without a whole lot of inconvenience. Lastly, now there surely were too few purebloods to continue the bloodlines, inbreeding would destroy them all soon.

The public didn't even care about the Dark Lord anyone. They had forgotten him. Red eyes narrowed further. He would have to remind them. Fear would bring the British wizards under his rule. Especially now that it didn't matter if they left or not, the demons would still be after them. Fear of him, and respect for him. Under his rule they might stand a chance of surviving the demons. It might mean sacrificing the rest of the world, but he would be their last hope. A bargain with the demons would not be hard. They needed help getting into this world. The elven spell was more than could be handled from inside the demon realm. He would have Europe, the demons could take the rest, and anyone who disobeyed him? To the demons with them.

The door across the hall banged open. The masked people jumped. Voldemort turned slowly. Another masked man ran in, kneeling before him, breathing hard.

"The fae have taken the fifth fortress." He man gasped out harshly. "Everyone is dead. I arrived at noon like you ordered, they were all dead already."

Voldemort's fists curled, almost tight enough to snap his wand. "All?"

"I did not search far – not the lower levels, the fae might come back."

"Coward." Voldemort hissed. Casting a quick cruciatus curse he spun around to the rest. "Gather everyone. We leave in five minutes. We will show these fae that they cannot mess with true wizards!"

In the back of the room four death eaters slipped away. Two to report to their respective agencies, two deserters taking the opportunity to flee, each on his own. This battle against the fae was going too far. They had no chance to survive both the fae and the demons. The first deserter ran into the forest. At the edge he stopped and turned, glancing back. He saw the second man and froze. The second didn't hesitate, his wand was out faster than the eye could follow and the first deserter collapsed, dead, his head split cleanly in half. The second deserter shrugged and turned into the shadows. No chance of his desertion being reported could be allowed. The second held out the wand, and snapped it, no magical evidence.

He stopped, draped in shadows, pulled off his mask, shook out his tangled hair, and transfigured his robes into something casual and not at all suspicious. Then he pulled out a preplanned portkey and in a heartbeat was gone. When in a crisis, each man for himself.

XX

"You're sure you can handle this?" Regulus asked, throwing his duffle bag over a shoulder. The unregistered, presumed dead animagus had waited out the worst of the plague at Moody's place.

"Yes. I have the magics planned. There's little left to do. I need only to finish the bloodmagic rituals and find a good time." Rahkesh said. "Thank you again for all your help Regulus."

Regulus shrugged of his thanks uncomfortably. "Nervous?"

"Oddly enough, yes. Not about killing him. But after…I'll be free…I've never really thought about what that would mean. I spent half my life thinking I would die before I turned seventeen." Rahkesh said.

"Do you still plan to kill Harry Potter?"

"I don't know. After the battle he'll just vanish. Become a recluse somewhere. No one will mind. There's too much else to do."

"I think you underestimate how much people care about Harry Potter." Regulus said. And Rahkesh was grateful for the differentiation between Harry Potter and who he now was.

"No, this time I think I've read them right. He's so long ago, they won't care much. Too much to do, too much to worry about. Voldemort dead, harry Potter alive but living a single quiet life somewhere. I think it will be accepted." Rahkesh said. "Do not worry so Regulus. You've done more than most would imagine doing. Go home."

Sirius's brother smiled a little. "I did no more than I had to." Rahkesh didn't respond to that. Regulus had his own ideas of what he had to do. And Rahkesh had never asked what Regulus had done under Voldemort's command. "I'm leaving the family house to you." Regulus added.

"Why?"

"I never want to set foot in that place again." Regulus said with a very real shudder. "I don't want the memories. None of them. Our parents, Rahkesh, were determined to produce fine death eater children. You do not do that through love and caring. Sirius almost got off easy – he was a lost cause in Gryffindor. That just made them concentrate harder on the rest of us. You want to know why Bella went insane? It sure wasn't because of Voldemort. It was her mother. They wanted tough little killers." Regulus grimaced. "They succeeded, for a while."

"What about Andromeda?"

"We've been in contact." Regulus said. "She's the smart one you know. Went and became a muggle. She's staying there, like that. She's happy, and she never wants to see the house again either. She's happy to leave it all to you. I don't think she cares at all about anything magical anymore. We probably won't see each other again."

"Go home Regulus." Rahkesh said with a smile, opening the door. "I've arranged so that the wards recognize you as being plague-free." Regulus had never had his blood formally tested. But he'd remained alone and inside for weeks. Rahkesh had sneaked his magical signature onto the list while a cooperative alumnus had politely ignored him.

With a cheery wave Regulus vanished. Rahkesh closed and locked the house. Moody would not be returning. There was little left there anyway. The old auror had started clearing out right after the demons hit. Now he'd relocated to two properties, one in Singapore, and one in America. These days he was busy with his newest job – training one of the Akren alumni battle units. He could hardly go into a war, not with his disabilities. But Moody would be on the guard force of the secret last-resort bunkers being installed all over the world, and he knew more than most about training magical fighters for combat.

Regulus would probably join the Australian forces eventually, Rahkesh thought. But first he would hopefully get some time with his family before the demons arrived. Regulus had never really spoken about them, and Rahkesh hadn't asked, sensing that Regulus had a paranoid need for secrecy. Hopefully with Voldemort gone he too would be able to leave his past behind.

XX

Rahkesh hissed in pain as the last of the lightning storm flowed back into him. Each spark and flicker was perfectly formed and controlled, but in spite of dispersing them across all of his runes, it still hurt. Blood was running through the runes on the floor, moving so fast and controlled that it looked like rope, or a red snake. His nerve endings, fried from six hours of cutting and magic channeling, screamed. He pulled the tip of the knife out of his foot, neatly connecting the runes into a loop. Then he drew the blood back in, disconnecting himself from the runes on the floor. When the last was reabsorbed he wound the lightning across the runes and magically closed them.

Incorporating his animagus's magic had been a last minute addition to his plans. It had felt like the right thing to do, and, as usual, his slightly insane and highly reactive animagus was just about ripping him apart to get free. Now it had settled, contented for the moment. The electricity in the bloodmagic would have a second advantage, the real reason Rahkesh had done it; as he had discovered while helping Silas experiment with his hypnotic abilities, Rahkesh's electrical abilities could pass through life and death and return to him with little damage. That time it had nearly killed him, now he knew what to do, and by preventing any of his magic from staying dead, or from brining death back with it, there should be no such problems. By having used his thunderbird's abilities in this piece of bloodmagic he ought to be able to fully access this piece both in his animagus form, and when some of his soul and magic was on the other side of the life/death barrier. He ought to have full command from either side. He would need the magic focusing to help him kill Voldemort, and he needed to be able to do it from life or death, and to cast it to the opposite side.

Slowly rising his vision went black. Rahkesh waited until it cleared, then headed for the door. He washed the floor clean as he left, and grabbed his robe from the rack inside the tiny waiting room. He was exhausted. But already he could feel the effects of the magic focusing ritual. He felt as though he could cast any spell perfectly, silently, without losing the faintest trace of magic along the spell. But this was an illusion. His magic was too worn out to cast anything. Casting a spell now would disable his ability to use that spell. Probably permanently.

Namach was waiting outside the bloodmagic chamber. As usual. It wasn't even a surprise anymore. Though Rahkesh still wondered at the ancient vampires' presence as _every_ ritual Rahkesh did. He couldn't tell if this was a golem or not. With so much to be done Namach was possibly the busiest person in the world. Rahkesh was wondering what the toll on the ancient was, since he probably had not rested in weeks. He also wondered just how many golems Namach currently had running around. He suspected this was the real Namach, since the MLFC was probably done for the day while the various species brainstormed about what they had to offer. Namach might have left that to the other vampire leaders to return to Akren for a while. This time there was another person with him. Professor Darkwind. Who _never_ went near the Akren bloodmagic chambers. The other Bloodmage had his own chambers at his mansion, wherever that was.

Professor Darkwind held out a hand, Rahkesh wordlessly handed him the knife. Swaying a little on his feet. Namach took his elbow and steered him away from the wall, towards the showers.

"That was a particularly intense ritual. I don't think you've used lightning before." Of course he knew perfectly well Rahkesh had not.

"It felt right." Rahkesh said, feeling a little dizzy. "And it worked. I should be able to use that focusing magic on anything alive or dead, including a dead or alive soul, regardless of which side I cast it from."

"It worked." Namach assured him, the vampire's voice sharp. He was not pleased with this success. Irritated, Rahkesh threw him a scowl. He was no closer to figuring out why his discovery of his abilities, which could make him one of the most successful necromancers ever, was so upsetting to the vampire.

"Going to tell me what the problem is?" He asked a little harshly. Namach growled low in his throat, but did not confront Rahkesh and instead turned to the other Professor.

"It's completely intact." Professor Darkwind said. Handing the knife back.

"The magics still feel strong." Namach said, watching the blade but not asking for it.

Rahkesh wiped it clean of his blood with a rag, and put it away. "Yes, I guess I won't have to work on it before the next ritual after all."

"Check it again later. When your own magics have stopped changing." Namach said. "It may change its state to match yours."

"How's Daray doing?" Rahkesh asked.

"Fine. He'll finish in a few hours." Namach said smoothly. "Rahkesh, during the ritual, aside from the thunderbird acting up, did you feel anything else different?"

"No." Rahkesh said. "Same as usual. Should I have felt something?"

"No. I was wondering if, as the other horcruxes were destroyed, anything changed."

"Thank Merlin, it hasn't." Rahkesh said.

"Good. If you're the same you should have little difficulty with the final piece." Namach said, Rahkesh glanced sideways at Professor Darkwind. The other was walking beside them, apparently paying no attention. But he must have known everything, else Namach would not have spoken in front of him. Rahkesh began to wonder how many knew his secret.

"Take the knife with you." Professor Darkwind said, turning away down a side corridor without looking at them.

"That felt ominous." Rahkesh said.

"Teachers are supposed to worry. And it is a rather big step, as your first piece of necromancy." Namach said, "we're interested to see how it goes. We think you're going to be fine. But we want to know what happens, how the magic works, and we're worried what will happen if you die. The magical mix up could cause a lot of problems. And, really Rahkesh, however much you deny it, you are rather important to your species."

"Uh huh, sure." Rahkesh said. "Do I look like I was born yesterday sir?" Namach stopped and rotated to stare at Rahkesh, who steadied himself against a wall and glared back. "You're not worried about my dying or messing up some magic." Rahkesh said, "that doesn't concern you in the least. You're afraid of something else, or, more likely, someone. I really wish you'd tell me who. If there is going to be trouble I need to know about it."

"There are plenty of beings who might be concerned about having a mortal with such abilities." Namach replied after a moment. "It's the ones who haven't yet spoken on the issue that you'll need to watch for." Abruptly, faster than Rahkesh could follow, he shouldered past Rahkesh and spun down a side corridor.

Rahkesh just about snarled, furious at the continuous evasion from the normally straightforward vampire. Namach might conceal the truth, lie outright about some things, or cleverly deceive people with cunning words, but he almost never simply didn't give an answer. Rahkesh cast a silent spell to silence any sound he made, and moved slowly back. He twisted enough to see down the hallway without being seen.

Professor Xanthius and Namach were standing outside another bloodmagic chamber, which was glowing from within. The elf was holding a scroll and speaking rapidly in elvish. Namach snarled, loud enough to have it echo. Gesturing furiously the vampire snapped back in the same language. The elf replied sharply. Namach stepped forward, right into the elf's face, and hissed out a stream of furious elvish. Hearing footsteps Rahkesh spun away and continued towards the showers. Another student moved past, ignoring him.

On the way out Rahkesh checked the schedules on the main doors to the wing that housed the bloodmagic chambers. No one was using the chamber Xanthius and Namach had been at.

XX

_I like mysteries. But you really do manage to step in everything. _Sygra said when Rahkesh finished telling her about Namach's odd behavior.

_Not intentionally!_ Rahkesh protested

_Of course not. You're just you._ Sygra said, sounding highly amused. _It will work itself out. We'll know what's going on soon enough. As long as we're prepared everything will be fine._

_I'll complete the magic directing ritual in a day or two. And if I have time a second focusing one. _

_That's pushing it. _

_If there was ever a time for that, it would be now. _

_Very well. Oh, and I AM coming with you for this. _Sygra warned, tail flicking around.

_I would never dream of leaving you behind._ Rahkesh assured her.

_Of course not._ Sygra sounded disbelieving.

_I mean it, I don't want to have to listen to you whine for another week like the last time I went off without you._ Rahkesh said, grinning.

_I do not whine!_ Sygra hissed.

_Of course. I was joking._ Rahkesh said quickly. Sygra scowled at him, eyes nearly shut.

_Your scent in nearly normal again_. Sygra said, looped over the bench in the extra chamber outside his shower. Rahkesh, washing blood out of his toes, looked up.

_Normal, as in before my basilisk-self went a little crazy?_

_Basilisks do not go crazy._ Sygra primly corrected him. _It was being territorial. That is perfectly normal thank you. Defending what is one's own is absolutely fine. It is the way, to stake out a territory of your own so that no other may trespass. _

_Very well. Do you mean I smell like I did before I started being territorial?_ Rahkesh corrected himself, summoning the dried blood out of his left ear carefully so as to avoid damaging his magics. As amazing as bloodmagic was being bathed in his own blood, which then dried, was really a nuisance.

_You are always territorial. The wards on your rooms are enough to destroy anyone dumb enough to try to invade. _

_Am I like I was before this latest snake-caused territorial cycle? _Rahkesh asked patiently. Sygra had been fully approving of his latest shake-up.

_Yes. Yet at the same time you are slowly changing. But it is too slow to truly sense._ Sygra said, tilting one head to the side a little. Mimicking the expression of confusion she saw on humans, since she couldn't do the facial part.

_Perhaps it is the slow changes from drinking Enireth's blood. _

_Maybe._ Sygra said, a little doubtfully. _I miss him, all of them._ Rahkesh looked up again. It was the first time Sygra had ever voiced any feelings about their leaving their friends behind. _You miss them too. You miss them, so I do._ Sygra said simply.

_There are days when I regret leaving_ Rahkesh admitted. He had not discussed his decision to return with Daray, Silas, or Xeri. But he had spoken about it with Sharahak, and for long hours on end with Nicodemus. They knew he reasons well enough, though Nic had always been of the opinion that Rahkesh owed his time nothing and getting rid of Voldemort was in no way his job (Rahkesh had seen nothing dangerous about telling his friend all about both his lives). Sygra, at the time, and a stated she didn't care, and that she believed that staying could imperil their future. Rahkesh had agreed, and once he had explained the problems caused by changing the past Nicodemus had also agreed. Still he missed the friends he had made in that one year, more than he missed any of his Hogwarts friends. Which seemed very odd.

_There's someone waiting for you._ Sygra said, breaking into his thoughts. _Outside the showers._

_Who?_

_The Amadan that tried to kill you. _

_I don't think Haedil was actually trying to kill me, just put me in a coma for a while._ Rahkesh said. Sygra just hissed. Rahkesh shrugged, he liked Haedil.

_He is the son of some of the fae Council is he not?_ Sygra asked. Rahkesh had to stop and think about that. Justin didn't hide his family, but Haedil rarely spoke about his.

_Yes…I think so._ Rahkesh finally said. _Or one of the tribal leaders, who are the ones that actually get things done._

He finished his shower quickly, dried, and got dressed, picking up his weapons from his bag. It was never a good idea to go unarmed in Akren. And there were rumors that the Professors were testing people by enchanting suits of armor to attack from under concealment spells. Rahkesh had prepared a rusting spell while waiting for the bloodmagic knife making room, just in case.

Haedil was leaning against a Greek-style marble pillar just outside the showers that attached onto the bloodmagic wing. A set of vines hanging form the ceiling and covered in glowing flowers were twisting at his hair. The fae was spinning a set of nunchucks, eyeing a pair of young werewolves who were snarling at each other. Both were still injured from the previous day's practice fights, and therefore probably easy targets. What exactly Haedil would possibly gain from attacking and defeating them right now Rahkesh couldn't guess, information most likely, or maybe their blood. Haedil straightened as he saw Rahkesh come out, and put the weapons away.

"Is there a reason you're waiting for me?" Rahkesh asked. Haedil stared at him steadily.

"What makes you think I was waiting for you?"

Rahkesh rolled his eyes and gave him a do-you-think-I'm-stupid look. Haedil shrugged and fell into step beside Rahkesh as Rahkesh turned to head back to his rooms.

"Voldemort is attacking our people constantly now." Haedil said. "He is hoping a victory over us will bring Britain back to him. It will not happen but we're awfully busy. The Council requested that I speak with you on their behalf."

"And?"

"I told them that I would only do that if they were willing to provide the medical care afterward." Haedil said, grinning. "Dad laughed his ass off and relayed the request through. I haven't gotten a reply."

"You realize how much trouble you're going to be in?" Rahkesh asked.

"Nope. See what they did to you isn't a secret anymore. One of the other Akren-trained fae went and told everyone. We live in colonies and tribes Rahkesh. Imagine what the rumor mills are like. Everyone knows and the Council is taking a lot of shit over it."

"Why'd they go and tell everyone?"

"Because the Council went and assaulted you, and you are also from Akren." Haedil replied as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, which it was. To those trained at Akren loyalty to, and often genuine affection for, anyone else trained at Akren, was second nature.

Then and there Rahkesh decided that if Voldemort ever harmed another Akren-trained fae he would go after him at once. And, perhaps, it would be worth it to allow the fae to know that it was Rahkesh who killed Voldemort. For every one else, the magical public, perhaps he could pretend he had forced Harry Potter to do it, and then agreed to take on the attention that would follow so Potter could go back to his self-chosen exile. It was a very believable lie. And Rahkesh could recite it under a truth potion for the British Ministry. A gesture back to the Akren fae in return, to kill the one who had already killed one of them and would probably hurt more soon. And the fae and others trained at Akren would be the only ones to know the truth.

"The fae from Akren are quite upset. And, not surprisingly, those are the more important individuals, though none have tried to get onto the Council – except Justin's mother."

"I really wanted to get this cleared up without causing any trouble."

"You don't think this is fun?" Haedil asked. "Oh we certainly do. The Council will have to make some apology today to clear things up."

"I already-"

"I know, Rianae told everyone. And Justin told the Council. That's why I'm here." Haedil said, grimacing, "they can't get here themselves, so I expect they'll take over my body for a while."

"They're allowed to do that?" Rahkesh asked, horrified.

"Yes. I don't really mind. I'll be able to get a look at their minds, and I've already set up a recording device so I'll remember everything. It'll be fun. I'm assuming you're not letting them off easy?"

"Depends on what they say. Why?"

"They're rather unpopular right now. The fae from Akren would be much pleased if you flipped them off and just walked away. But we know that you want to resolve this soon."

_They are already here_ Sygra hissed.

_How?_

_Never mind that. I will deal with this. _Sygra said. She always took her role as his familiar and friend seriously, and now she was being protective as well. Rahkesh stopped. Sygra slid off his shoulder a little and stretched out towards Haedil. Coiling back like a spring she looked him in the eye and let her hood flare threateningly.

"A highly intelligent familiar." Haedil's voice changed to a soft crisp from his usual higher clear ringing voice.

Rahkesh spun, lightning flashed down his arms to his fingers and a crack of thunder rumbled through the air. Sygra hissed her approval of his tactics. Rahkesh dropped the usual concealment of the glow the dragon blood had left in his eyes and hissed. Basilisk magic flowed and venom tang felt slightly bitter in the air. A rustle of feather followed him and a sharp piercing breeze spun around them.

_Very good._ Sygra said. _You need to show your magics more often._

Rahkesh did not reply, not wanting to speak to her too much in front of the fae Council, in case they tried to telepathically eavesdrop. He didn't know if that was possible, but he knew little about the fae powers.

Haedil's midnight-black eyes had gone pale blue, and behind them Rahkesh could see the eyes of a score looking back at him, pinpoints of light behind the steely blue gaze.

X

X

So who is Namach worried about? Guesses please, cookies for winner(s).

I know, I know, Voldemort needs to die, the thing with the fae needs to be cleared up, then we can get on with things. I need one chapter to get rid of Voldemort and close things with the Council, then at least one and possibly two to deal with the fallout. Then one for the end of the Council and to begin battle plans and to bring Britain back from the dark ages. Then…well I can't give that away because then you'd all know where this fic is going for the rest of it and the sequel. I think this fic will have ten more chapters, but that's just a rough estimate. Then we'll be on to the next one (which is the fic I've been waiting to write since I started the prequel. In fact the next fic is my reason and inspiration for writing both the first two, just to get to that one). It'll be fun.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Much applause for the amazing Eirame, who is still translating all of this fic into French, and to Ahlmal for his Spanish translating skills! Hercules has nothing on you!

**Okay, so I was gone for a long time. But the last chapter was a pretty good length, and this one is a damn EPIC. I've read whole books shorter than this (not exaggerating). **Which do you prefer? Shorter periods between updates or longer updates? (Does not actually matter – I update whenever I get back to civilization (one that has internet)).

**Please read at least twice, seriously important chapter here. I mean it. Actually maybe four reads, just to catch everything. A lot questions are being answered and I'm setting up a lot of stuff here – everything contained herein will return later (except Voldemort). **(Author is seriously going insane with too-complex fic. Especially since I don't take notes or actually plan this shit out, it just happens).

Chapter 21

"Given that you are playing body-snatchers with a friend of mine, I would appreciate an introduction. Now. Before I decide you're a threat to him and rip your sorry asses out of his mind." Rahkesh said sharply, biting back some harsher words. This was creepy. Haedil's face had gone this terrible blank that was making Rahkesh itch to attack, even though he knew Haedil wasn't being harmed. Instantly aggressive and angry for some reason he wasn't quite sure of. A moment later he remembered why – this was the same governing body that had decided to force a soul reading of someone whom they did not know, had never met, and who had never threatened them. It might not be the same beings – several had been forced into retirement over the whole business, but it was the same group. They had almost killed him.

He hoped the Council really was intent on peace-making. Rahkesh could do a few very small spells without permanent damage, but anything more intense that lighting a candle would cause him real problems right now. Did the Council know that? Had they waited until now to talk so that Rahkesh couldn't fight back magically? Or attack them if he got angry. Probably they had planned this.

The beings currently occupying Haedil's body laughed softly. This time it sounded like many voices, of several genders. Weird. The laughter stopped.

"Your friend is safe. And you, Rahkesh Asmodaeus, you are currently speaking to the primary members of the Fae Council."

Rahkesh relaxed a little, allowing the obvious signs of magic and defensiveness to shrink away. He kept his aggressive posture, relying on the animal instinct to tell him that this was the right thing to do. Distantly he hoped Haedil really was okay with this. Other species often seemed to be okay with things that would have started a new world war had they been suggested to magical humans, and certainly if muggles heard of them.

"And." Rahkesh drawled slowly, sensing for magic, but not watching for facial cues. Haedil's was a perfect blank. So blank, it made Rahkesh's skin crawl. Sygra, arched away from him towards Haedil, had not relaxed her attack stance, nor her continuous slit-eyed hissing and swaying.

"A year ago the then Council members made a mistake Rahkesh. A grave mistake that, while we cannot correct nor undo, we can apologize for." The voices said. "Their decision to read your mind was badly flawed and inappropriate. We would now like to apologize for their/our actions."

"Badly flawed, all right, not quite so fitting as downright bat-shit insane. And how many of those jackasses are still on your happy little Council?" Rahkesh hissed.

"Less than half." Well at least they were being honest, Rahkesh knew that from Rianae.

"What, exactly, did those sons of bitches learn from my soul?" Rahkesh asked, deliberately continuing to provoke them. He wanted to know how much they were willing to take before they snapped back.

"Little." Rahkesh detected some bitterness in the response. "Very little. Your magic turned most of it into mushy color. The magics tried to electrocute the souls of those who tried to review it."

"That recording will, of course, be destroyed." Rahkesh hissed, keeping his smugness in check.

"It already has. And those involved have had their memories permanently cleaned out."

Rahkesh had not expected that. He had never expected the Council would remove their own memories of that reading. He realized then that he was going to have to forgive the Council, or at least appear to. But he didn't want to be their friend, and he didn't want to be nice just yet. A thought materialized, just to let the fae know _exactly_ where he stood. Rahkesh had a place in the world, and shoving it in their faces would probably even raise his standing in their eyes, never mind the implied threat.

"Will you accept our apology?"

"Apology accepted." Rahkesh grunted, turning his head to the side with a careless shrug. He looked back and fixed them with a freezing glare. "Now get out of Akren and release my comrade."

A soft sigh echoed through the air, and Rahkesh felt something not unlike caress against his face, he caught the magic and recognized it. The Headmistress had been listening. His statement was a threat without really being one, sort of. If the Council did not obey the Akren alumni would find out about it, from him personally, and the students and alumni would then know about the Council getting into the school. Even if the Headmistress had probably allowed it the Council did not need the outrage this would generate. The Council could get into a lot of trouble if they didn't leave _now._ And, of course, Rahkesh was expressing to everyone exactly where his loyalties were, and who the people were he was willing to fight for. This conversation would not be kept private; Haedil would probably show the other Akren fae all of it and Rahkesh assumed it would get around within a few days. This would certainly improve Rahkesh's standing. The fact that he was telling the truth (he had to – he couldn't do the magics to block the Council's truth-reading abilities) just meant he'd get a bonus for the honesty. He meant everything he was implying. The Council chuckled.

"Akren trained and Akren loyal indeed. The older graduates are right to be so fond of you." This was one of them talking, not all. Rahkesh frowned just a little; the voice was familiar…a little like Justin's. One of his parents then.

The Council left. Rahkesh could feel them leave, sense it like a smell vanishing. He felt his own instinctive response to them leaving as well. As they left the Headmistress's presence _smiled_ at him, a thoroughly unnerving sensation, and faded. Haedil's terrible blank look vanished and his eyes blinked furiously as his mind regained its body.

"I can't believe you let them do that to you." Rahkesh said. He was surprised. Just like that a year of anger gone and things more or less set right. Funny how things could happen so fast when everyone involved wanted them to work out right. Just minutes and the year-long standoff was over. Haedil leaned against the carved marble wall and gave Rahkesh a tired look.

"You're opinion of the Council may be a bit biased Rahkesh. For all the mistakes they've made with you they really are an effective governing body. The first Council united the fae tribes and since then the Council has ended our wars and held the tribes together through some rough times. They've eradicated all the major infectious diseases our species has had, and brought every tribe and colony to complete literacy, in multiple languages. We all have excellent health now and almost no one living in real poverty. We've got a system of laws that is consistent, where we used to have different laws for every settlement, and we have lower crime rates than almost anyone else, minus maybe the goblins. The Council has also led the fae into war to protect us from every enemy that has ever tried to go after even the smallest colony, including assassinating dozens to protect the veela recently, until the veela asked them to stop. They're not perfect, they saw you as a curiosity and a possible threat, but they've been very effective, far more so than really almost any human government has ever been. With the change over on the Council these last few months we're expecting good things." Haedil explained tiredly. Rahkesh nodded, knowing that his outlook on the Council was based solely upon the events of the previous year. And Haedil was certainly right about the Council being better most of the human governments Rahkesh knew of, certainly better than what his homeland had had.

"Did you hear all of that?"

"Yes. They could have blocked that but I let them know I would fight it." Haedil said.

"What on earth were they talking about – the older graduates?" Rahkesh asked, confused. Haedil rested his head against the wall and smiled gently.

"Oh Rahkesh haven't you caught on yet? After that book on parselmagic every alumni not already aware took a look at your records, asked some questions about your personality. They're really quite fond of you, everyone is. You're Akren's newest star, _our_ Thunderbird."

Someone chuckled behind him. Rahkesh turned and started to see Daray leaning over his shoulder. He must have been there for some time. Sygra, not wanting speak and bother Rahkesh, was in the vampire's face. Now she relaxed and wrapped around Rahkesh's neck.

"He's entirely correct you know." The vampire said, unashamed to be caught listening. "Never mind that the professors like you and our own Vampire Lord will probably invite you to be his apprentice. Alumni get updates on what's happening at the school, newsletters with information on current students. Just in case they see someone they might want to hire later or some such. You're in many of those."

"There's _what_?" Rahkesh asked, voice rising incredulously. Haedil laughed.

"We thought you might not know. Since you weren't recruited by any of the usual methods, you just walked in one day and got accepted. And clearly you didn't have enough background information. But we weren't about to tell you. You might get panicked. Everyone thought it best to wait until you felt safe here. It's only stuff that everyone at the school knows anyway, so don't worry over it."

"You what!?"

"Rahkesh you were quite the aggressive fearful thing when you got here." Daray pointed out. "The alumni have been keeping up on your exploits that made the newsletter. You're animagus certainly made it in, so did your basilisk transformation, and you're completely destroying a never-before-altered potion in the basement safe cavern during Silas experiment. And both of us made it in for our fast advances in bloodmagic. And recently your issues with the fae have been there. And your involvement with the MLFC – you're time travel, demon fighting, having a loyal demon/vampire elder friend, and your disagreement with Voldemort who's one of the other basilisks, your involvement with the British Ministry raid, your involvement in the portal fiasco in Mexico, all of that. They don't publish anything that might possibly be harmful, and they only publish what most of the students, or the general public, already know or can learn. However it has given everyone something interesting to follow this last year or so. The alumni are quite proud of having you as one of ours."

Rahkesh shook his head in wonder. And he hadn't caught on? It seemed very weird indeed, but also did make some sense. Even after graduation Akren alumni stayed close with each other and with current students. Being trained at Akren made you part of a very large family. A family that might kill you, but was also absolutely loyal against the rest of the world. It was a weird dichotomy of violence and loyalty.

"Come on," Haedil said, slapping Rahkesh's shoulder, "dinner will be ready by now." Rahkesh, still thinking, fell in between him and Daray. Finally he decided to forget about his apparent and previously unknown notoriety.

"How'd it go?" He asked Daray.

"Very well." Daray said smugly. "I think I'd better wait a week until I go over the next one again, just to make sure it all settled. Especially because these ones are the ground stage for the whole set and they change the way I can do magic."

"True, but I think I'll still try to finish my magic directing one within six days at least." Rahkesh said. His magic was already starting to settle some so it must have gone really well. He'd meditate some later and examine how the runes were working and how his magic was flowing through them.

"Was there any damage to your knives?" Haedil asked them both. Haedil was planning to try the same ritual in a few weeks.

"No damage that I could find. Professor Darkwind was around with Professor Namach and they didn't sense anything either." Rahkesh said.

"They both came to watch you?" Daray asked, grinning.

"Yeah."

"Namach really is going try to convince you to become his next apprentice." Haedil said. "Assuming of course any of us live long enough to care."

"Thought about that any?" Daray asked.

"Living or deciding whether or not to be turned into a vampire?" Rahkesh asked, being thick deliberately.

"Don't be dense. You wouldn't have to become a vampire to be his apprentice." Haedil said.

"What?" Rahkesh asked.

"Rahkesh you've made your opinion on the matter pretty obvious." Daray drawled, "I doubt Namach would try to convince you otherwise. Not all of his apprentices have been vampires, the majority yes, but not all. Merlin was as human as you are."

"Merlin?"

"You didn't know?"

"I do now."

"Merlin was a friend of some alumni when he was a kid. Akren was pretty new then but growing in power. He never came here but Namach trained him some, and Merlin had to leave Britain at one point for some reason or other, he stayed with Namach for a few years. However he and Namach had some serious disagreements about whether or not prophecies actually exist – Namach is adamant that they don't. They were always good friends though. Namach officiated at Merlin's funeral, the second one I mean, not the one where he faked it."

"He didn't fake it. He just didn't stay dead. He was one of the few non-necromancers to manage that." Rahkesh corrected.

"Whatever. He's also had a few fae apprentices, though I don't think there have been any werewolves."

"Hmm."

"So?"

"I think we're going to live." Rahkesh said, deliberately picking the wrong question, Daray actually growled. Haedil was quietly laughing. "Therefore I don't have to think about the other one now." Rahkesh added, grinning at Daray's shocked look. To a vampire having _the _Vampire Lord possibly wanting him as an apprentice would be a hugely major thought. Rahkesh was shrugging it off.

"Rahkesh. Do have any idea how important this is?" Daray asked angrily.

"Yes. I'm just procrastinating."

"Well stop." Daray said. "It'll cause enough of a fuss that he'd even consider it. Though that shouldn't happen you can bet someone will get angry. No need to insult everyone by making them think you don't even care. Especially since there is no faster way to learn bloodmagic than from the person who invented most of it."

Rahkesh shrugged, he really didn't want to bother with thinking that far ahead just yet. "I'll start thinking about it." He agreed, if only just to get Daray to calm down. "but I can't really answer until after I graduate anyway and he knows that. And that's assuming any of us are alive enough to care."

XX

"No destroying anything. Practice spells in containment wards or on some of the targets." Ally said as the group entered her rooms. Rahkesh grabbed one of the beanbag chairs before Nuri could. The panther growled, lashed his tail, and headed for Ally's bed to stretch out in the sun.

"If he claws that up you're in trouble." Ally told Silas.

"He's perfectly house trained. Silas said, "grandmother wouldn't have it any other way."

Nuri yowled at them and hit his long tail on Ally's bed.

"Could we use him for practice?" Daray asked.

"Only if I can use Satan." Silas replied. Nuri actually hissed. "Relax Nuri, I wouldn't let him hurt you."

Daray, ever one to test boundaries, tossed a hex that would take Nuri's fur off. Nuri rose, snarling. His fur flashed gold and the spell rocketed back at Daray. Daray hit the floor, the spell flashed overhead, and left a gaping black hole in the wall.

"Never seen him do that before." Rahkesh commented as nonchalantly as possible as they all stared. Nuri growled, then curled up and began washing his chest with long strokes of his pink tongue.

"Daray…" Ally's low warning made Rahkesh and Silas back away fast. Daray flinched away as Ally's slowly took one of the huge axes down and began twirling it. The vampire began repairing the wall while everyone else found seats. Silas went to Nuri at once and began looking for damage. Nuri rolled onto his back, put his paws across Silas's face, and purred.

"Did you teach him that?" Ally asked. "Or was that your magic?"

"Neither, and I've never seen any of that gold-stuff before. He can shake off stunners, but that's a new trick." Silas said, tugging at one of Nuri's ears. "What was that all about?"

Nuri rolled back over and bent in half to clean his back claws, ignoring Silas completely. Silas's eyes got a vague glazed look as he connected to Nuri telepathically as much as he could. Nuri tossed his head and growled. Silas blinked rapidly and woke up.

"He just can." Silas said with a shrug. Rahkesh reached out gently for the vampire's mind _the elf blood he swallowed?_ Not everyone here was aware of that. Silas shrugged again, though his eyes had again gotten a glazed look. Rahkesh guessed he was communicating with Professor Namach.

"See? No harm." Daray said, finishing with the wall. Silas came back to the present before his cousin noticed anything. Ally began inspecting her repaired wall while bickering with Daray over his spell casting technique.

Rahkesh was already flipping open a book of dark arts. Curses mostly. They had a morning off from everything else to make up lists of spells that might work on demons. He had a list of stuff he knew by heart, but he had been slowing down on his studying since the semester had started because of everything else happening. He really needed a few days to just work on spells. Fortunately they had two days for this. No classes, except bloodmagic/necromancy.

Ally flopped down next to Nuri and dragged over a massive black book. "I've got this curse I've been waiting to try." She said, holding it up.

"Go on." Rianae said.

"It's a curse that ruptures the intestines, but it get through the skin without damage by following the body's nerve channels. I thought perhaps, since they're immortal and such tough rugged fellows, one of our vampires might volunteer…?"

Rianae, Daray and Silas all put up shields and looked at each other, then Ally, warily. Justin, curled up next to Rianae, lurched away quickly to avoid any explosion.

There was a long nervous silence, then Haedil started laughing.

"Better to just grab the next one who tries to drink your blood and give it a go." He said.

"Can we find potions and stuff besides spells?" Daray asked, "they didn't say we couldn't."

"The potions students are doing that." Tyler said, arriving late.

"Tyler!" Silas said, "you're still alive?"

"No need to sound disappointed." Tyler joked as she collapsed onto the last beanbag chair, looking completely exhausted.

"We're not. But no one's seen you since last year." Rahkesh said quickly and Silas rolled his eyes.

"Busy. I've been taking extra potions classes, at Akren and at other schools. I want to get my Potions Mastery by winter break." Tyler said. Rahkesh mentally calculated, by winter break would mean Tyler would make it by twenty, there were only two score or so who had managed that. She looked like it was taking everything she had. Surely an early Mastery wasn't quite worth that. "I studied right through the summer with some of the alumni Potions Masters.

"Winter break huh? Pity we'll all be dead." Daray said. "What stuff have the potions students come up with?"

Tyler grinned nastily, "you'll see. The demons will regret ever setting foot on Earth."

"Go on, you can't stop there." Rahkesh said.

"We have Strawlime." Tyler stated simply, as if that answered everything, which it did. Akren's own personal psychopathic serial killer was, while an excellent Professor, more than a little scary. With an open season on demons to kill however many he wanted with whatever method he wanted Strawlime was undoubtedly in his element. "He's been going on for weeks about murderers and serial killers having a place in the world after all. He went and dragged out all of his old experiments to test on demons."

"Do we have enough prisoners for that?" Silas asked.

"No. But Strawlime nagged Professor Namach into getting him fifty or so of the bodies from that little fiasco in Mexico. We've been testing stuff and recording the effects. It isn't terribly realistic, since they're dead and all, but we're getting a good idea of how to engineer a potion to get around the scale armor." Tyler explained.

XX

"Four days. Is your basilisk going into another crazy streak?" Namach asked dryly, watching Rahkesh stagger slightly. Rahkesh righted himself enough to shrug. He'd pushed himself to finish his magic directing ritual. It had gone flawlessly, but his skin hurt and his body was letting him know in no uncertain terms that going through this so soon had not been the best choice.

"You smell stable enough I guess." Namach said, "maybe a bit crazy." He was breathing deeply and Rahkesh wondered how many stages Namach's scent-based bloodmagic had. And how many variations for specific things. His ability to smell out bloodmagic and even exactly how it functioned was extreme. Namach could learn more about anything involving bloodmagic through a deep breath than most Bloodmages could in a week of study. Of course, the vampiric abilities and inherent magic must have helped.

Rahkesh had intended to give it a few more days, but Voldemort had raided an abandoned veela enclave the day before. He'd had, apparently, burned one library and stolen another. And the fae were pissed. It didn't help that the Sirens, missing since before the start of the Conclave, had yet to be found. The merefolk claimed they had found sea demon magic in the area, and scat. The Harpies had descended on the islands to investigate, only to turn back when Voldemort's spies were found sneaking around the only remaining Harpy colony in Britain. Which was very, very bad. The Dark Lord Grindelwald had run afoul of the harpies once, and only once. They had decimated his supporters early on and delayed his rise to power by several years. The harpies had chased off Voldemort's spies, but Voldemort had cleverly planned a little fight and had succeeded in collecting some harpy blood. Very powerful stuff. The harpies had retaliated by annihilating Voldemort's remaining werewolf supporters that morning. Voldemort and the fae were coming seriously unglued. And now it was only a matter of time. Rahkesh had to get rid of Voldemort soon. And he didn't feel comfortable attempting it without at least the first stage of his magic directing ritual.

"Seems the knife managed it just fine." Professor Darkwind said to Professor Namach. "That should be indicative of his overall state."

"_He_ is standing right here, and could have told you the _he_ is just fine." Rahkesh said in a soft sigh. "I'm exhausted and my skin aches, but the magic is already flowing smoothly."

Professor Darkwind wandered back to his metalmagic rooms without another word. Rahkesh watched him go and glanced over at Namach. Darkwind was just weird sometimes.

"He's always like that." Namach said to the unasked question. "Always has been, even when he was still a student here."

"I really do feel fine." Rahkesh said.

"I can smell that. I can also smell that your blood is changing again." Namach said. Rahkesh winced as the ancient vampire put up anti-eavesdropping wards as he spoke.

"Again?"

"It never stopped. That dragon's blood is far from done with you. It's just constrained by your magics, your animal forms, your species, mind, and all the injuries you've had since drinking it. You've been changing slowly ever since it got into your system. It slowed whatever is happening for some long stretches, and then it's done some other stuff really fast. That thunderbird would have taken longer to show up if the dragon's blood hadn't thrown it out of your mind to make room. I can't find any real system to what has been happening to you, since the dragon's blood has only had one real obvious direct effect – your eyes. The rest is secondary to chemical and magical changes that have no obvious rhyme or reason. I suspect there are some really direct obvious effects, but I'd need to test your blood on a vampire to confirm."

"I'd rather not."

"I, also, suspect that might not be in anyone's best interests." Namach agreed. "Xanthius and I have agreed on some of the clearer pieces, one; your blood is as lethal to vampires as regular dragon's blood unless they manage to simply overpower it, two; your blood is flammable when you choose to make it, three; your blood sheds poisons and most toxins rather than mixing and absorbing – like oil and water, four; your blood clots in wounds _really_ fast, five; your blood is/can be highly electrified, six; your blood cells don't die when you're transmitting magic through death and back, seven; your blood can reabsorb electricity that has been through death and back with no ill effects."

"That sounds like a lot of changes."

"Not really. The same could be done with bloodmagic in a few years of hard work, and a suitably strong bloodmage could probably brute-force your body and magic to as you were before, though only _very_ temporarily. The thunderbird was already part of you; the dragon's blood just forced it to appear early. Now I smell the changes speeding up again." Namach grinned, "and of course the Vashora probably scented that as well at some point." Rahkesh groaned. "Don't worry about it, if the dragon's blood was harmful to you we'd know."

"Define "harmful"." Rahkesh said. Namach ignored him.

"I do suspect we'll see some interesting effects soon." Namach said, without enthusiasm. "And I must admit I'm not looking forward to seeing what's next. I have a few suspicions of what will happen to you soon, and I have to admit I'm not thrilled at the prospect."

"Going to finally tell me what you're worried about?"

"No."

"Thanks." Rahkesh snarled, voice an almost-hiss and sounding totally unnatural. Bizarrely, and completely out of character, Namach did not react to the blatant disrespect.

"If it happens, you'll know." Namach said with a sigh. "Let the other students know we don't have class today, Nvara will announce a meeting point for bloodmagic students later to make a schedule for reviewing the bloodmagic defenses. I only have so many golems and I suspect I need to do some work on my own bloodmagics."

After the ancient had vanished Rahkesh paused to wonder if Namach was working on his bloodmagics in anticipation of dealing with whatever was going to happen to Rahkesh. What could possibl_y_ _worry_ the world's reigning Master Bloodmage?

XX

"Ten meters acid-resistant titanium. It's been coated forty times with ten millimeters of laced Diamond Blue." The witch leading them said, pointing to the massive walls. Rahkesh didn't know enough about the Russian military to read what her rank was from her uniform, but all the bits of gold and decorations had to count for something. She was carrying a wand, a curved knife, and a muggle handgun. Plus six vials attached in a row to her belt that Rahkesh would bet had potions in them. The soldiers they passed were wearing official looking uniforms that were in the muggle style, rather than the long somewhat cumbersome robes the British Aurors had worn. Rahkesh thought the muggle uniforms were probably easier to move in, but maybe not as good overall armor and not as good for concealing things.

Diamond Blue was a potion, electric blue in color, that was as hard as actual diamond. It was a recent invention by an Akren alumnus Potions Master. Very thick when brewed right, when it dried it sealed to itself in crystalline structure that looked, from above, slightly lace-like. Lasers could get through it, eventually, but not a whole lot else. The structure meant that if it was scraped the adjacent bits actually slid to fill it in, and because it was magical it then resealed. It would take a very long time, of continuously working at it, to get through four hundred millimeters.

The Russians had requested that he and Sharahak take a tour of their "demon-proof" facility. It was an immense bunker designed to hold five thousand for up to two years during any attack. Rahkesh had never seen any sort of military installation and was curious to see what the Russians had come up with. Sharahak was just anxious about their chances of survival.

The perimeter had been covered with muggle technologies. Cameras, laser guided cannons, remote controlled tanks, landmines, pit traps with spikes, and remote controlled missiles with the usual muggle explosives. Closer in had been threadmagic wards woven so tight that the bedrock no longer fully existed and nothing grew. The threadmagic had been amazing, done in over a thousand varieties of thread, by dozens of Threadmages. Each with individual knot systems and patterns, some wards offensive, others defensive. All sharing power flows, but able to cut off a damaged set, like amputating a limb, and then sealing it away in order to save the whole. It was an amazing system, and with the center for the wards inside the building it would be almost impossible to remove. The threadmagic center was inside, but linked to the outside threads by soulmagic rather than thread, so as not to compromise the physical barriers. Someone, probably more than one someone, had given up their souls to create this place. Rahkesh suspected they had been volunteers; the public was very much aware of everything that was happening and finding a volunteer for a sacrifice like that could not have been too hard. There was always some brave person who was for some reason unable to do anything in an actual fight, but who was ready to sacrifice their souls so that others had a chance. Especially if their family was promised placement in the bunker when the time came.

"Heat resistant?" Sharahak asked, tapping the shell.

"Yes. We poured raw magma on it." She answered. Rahkesh wondered how they'd gotten that stuff. "There is a layer of threadmagic wards, plus the metalmagic wards and bloodmagic wards. Even if the demons get themselves some amazing lasers it won't do them any good. The Mages outdid themselves. They've got it all rigged up so that everything reflects right back out."

"Demons don't have any such technology." Sharahak said. "But should the worst happen they could conceivably learn it from the muggles. However their personal magic is generally completely incompatible with…ahh…circuits." Sharahak said, struggling for the word. With a lot of help from Namach he was catching up awfully fast, but he still took time to figure out all the muggle technology.

"That is a good thing to know, the less they improve from interacting with muggles the better." Their guide said. "It's also radiation resistant. We grabbed some fresh stuff from the muggles nuclear power plants. Our government and theirs are pretty close. They didn't mind not having to ever hear about a ton of hot waste." She led them through the sliding doors. "Three sets of gates. No two can be open at once. There's another layer of the titanium and the space between is filled with shells from Golden Fairy cocoons. We powdered them, superheated them, mixed in liquid sulfur, shaped the stuff into springs and let it harden. Just over four hundred million springs. The whole structure can move twelve meters any direction and bounce back. That should give us good chances during just about any magic-induced earthquake or impact. And there's not a natural fault line for a long way around."

"How fast is the recoil?" Rahkesh asked, thinking about whiplash.

"Slow. Huge pressure bends the springs to a certain point, after that the webbing from the cocoons resists, more resistance for more pressure. Slow impact at the end and a slow slide back."

"An arch demon can do about as much damage as a large Siberian IceScale." Sharahak said, referring to the northern-most dragon species found in Russia. A species descended in a convoluted route from Ice Dragons, like Ice Dragons they grew throughout their lives. "A really old powerful one could do a good deal more, they always grow." Rahkesh filed that away, arch demons worked a little like the older dragon species.

"Brute strength won't get them far here." The hallways could use some work, Rahkesh thought. Everything was grey, puke orange, and dark blue. Mind-numbing really. The main corridor floor was marked with red, green, blue, and purple lines. They had passed the turnoffs for the others, and now followed the red, which ran down the middle of the floor.

The red line led them to the command center. This was a rectangle room with plain white walls and a score or so of seats. A magical monitoring system took up much of two walls. Small crystals with labels glowed, blinked, or were dark. Half a dozen technicians were moving around. Rahkesh was surprised to see what appeared to be a variant of a muggle keyboard hooked up to several stations. Clearly not actually electrical it was some other system he was unfamiliar with. However the potion-filled glowing screens clearly had some sort of information scrolling slowly across them in a very computer-like fashion. Rahkesh didn't readily speak any languages but English, Chachapoyan, and Parseltongue, but Sharahak was studying the readouts, clearly recognizing something.

"The floor lines show the way to all the civilian and military centers." Rahkesh turned to see a small heavy man with sparkling dark eyes and a thick goatee beside him. Like their previous guide he was sporting a ridiculous number of gold bits and colorful decorations. "Red for the military units stationed here, purple for the laboratories and work stations for the magical defenses, green and blue for different sections of the civilian quarters. Civilians can't go into red or purple only areas unless carrying the correct magical tag and access code."

A system that did make some sense, Rahkesh thought. You didn't need civilians running around during a war. And while it might seem odd to separate the Russian military from some of the areas where the more intense magical undertakings were done, that was a sort of paranoid security measure; Guild members could not fully be part of any military. No Guild member, Threadmage Guild or any other, could join any of the world's military's, except as a consultant.

It was a bit of a problem for many countries. If their best and brightest went as far as they could in a magical system they would have to join one of the Guilds, if they did they could no longer be drafted. If they didn't then that country didn't have as many quasi-patriotic mages to call upon and they looked less educated compared with other nations.

The system had originated because those who trained for so long in a certain branch of magic didn't like being told what to do by their country of origin, and had wanted some sort of safety from politics. Those from Akren were already safe from being called home to go to war. Others had not been. So the Guilds had decided to take all of their members out of all military service, except as consultants, or if the Guild decided to take a side – which had yet to happen.

Of course "consultant" was a term with a wide variety of meanings. During the Second World War several necromancers had actively fought, with the knowledge of their muggle governments, their Guild, and under the orders of their Ministry of Magic. What Guild members decided to do was their business. The Guild was there to say that they could not be forced to fight. Some Guilds also had rules about recalling their members if the Guild voted to be impartial or voted to take a specific side. Obviously if any Guild member was killed fighting for one side or the other then there would be no retaliation. But should a Guild member be killed any other way, even accidentally, then the rest of the Guild could usually be counted on to turn the nation responsible into a bloody smoking ruin. Fortunately for everyone this situation hadn't yet happened.

For those who were too active in the wars their nation might be fighting the Guild would sometimes order them to desist. And Rahkesh had a suspicion that some of the Guilds had a habit of assassinating these dissidents if they didn't follow orders, if only to keep the world wide power balance somewhat predictable or stable. So for the Russians to be wary about letting people who would probably be Guild members into their military command center was understandable. What was less understandable was what made the Russians think they could keep any Guild member out if they wanted to get in.

"A sensible system," Rahkesh said approvingly, seeing as the man was waiting for him to respond.

"No it isn't. If we're living down here hiding like scared rabbits with a wolf above the burrow there won't be enough of us left to care about stuff like that, and damn the Guilds." The little man snapped at him. Sharahak was taken aback, Rahkesh managed not to react at all.

"I suspect that anyone doing a tricky bloodmagic attack pattern with offensive operations beyond the bunker will appreciate not having to use too many locks on the room to keep out curious children." Rahkesh said dryly, hiding his surprised reaction very well.

The man squinted up at him, "depends doesn't it? If we're going to be able to save only a small portion of magical humans, do we choose children?"

"In interesting matter to consider," Rahkesh agreed. "I assume you've put it to the Conclave?"

"Yes we have." Their original guide interrupted before her counterpart could say anything. "They're discussing it today."

"Do you know how many facilities like this are operational?" Rahkesh asked.

"None. This one isn't supplied yet. By the time the demons can attack again there should be enough such places for fifty thousand, minimum, or maybe even more, of all magical species, worldwide." She said. "Some spaces are being built specially for centaurs, merefolk, and fairies, the rest of us have similar enough needs to manage. So it'll be at least fifty thousand spaces that have to be divided between species. Realistically we're expecting more like a hundred thousand spaces, but some of the other nations are being secretive about what they're building, or have already built. Then each species chooses who to send. We're working everything out assuming fifty thousand, if there are more then that's just good news."

"I imagine that's some debate." Rahkesh said, wondering if he could go to see.

"Fist fights in the halls." The man said nodding. "Conclusion at noon, our time, was to divide up the slots based on percentage of total magical population. Of all sentient species – which are of course all MLFC members – the percentage of each is being calculated right now. Humans will probably wind up with the most since we are a larger percentage of the total magical species, and then _we_ need to decide who we choose to save if the worst happens."

"If everyone is sharing knowledge and jointly building these bunkers then individual countries won't be deciding for themselves." Rahkesh observed, "all humans will have to agree."

"Exactly." The man, who Rahkesh guessed was probably a General, though he hadn't given his name yet, said. "Should be an interesting meeting."

That, Rahkesh decided, was the understatement of the month. A moment later he felt a vampiric presence, the main doors opened and the Master of Moscow, Vladimir Konovalov, entered talking with a human, and followed by two vampires.

"Afternoon Sharahak, Rahkesh." Konovalov said. "This is General Andropov of the Russian Magical Air Force."

"How exactly are the vampires going to handle living in a bunker?" Rahkesh asked, "I'm assuming not everyone in here will be keen to share their blood." All three humans grinned a little.

"Not a problem." Konovalov answered, fangs flashing. "We're collecting right now. We'll have enough stored for a decade. Our needs will be much less than any other species in here. More difficult is getting the werewolves enough space to transform, since we can't count on storing enough wolfsbane potion. Even the best stuff requires just the right conditions to be stored for any real length of time."

"The best solution would be to have most of the humans become vampires, then we might have room for more – we won't need as much space to grow or store foods." One of Konovalov's aides said.

"Uh huh. Or we could just only keep a few vampires. It's not like you need genetic diversity or anything like that. One little bloodsucker would be enough to bring back the population. Not that anyone really _needs_ vampires around, since you're just parasites and all." General Andropov said cheerfully, grinning as one of the two aides growled at him. Konovalov just looked amused.

"A few of us were worried the Tristan Namach might do just that." He said. "It would not be without some precedent. Or, perhaps, he would only keep a few of us around, the useful intelligent ones." A flick of his eyes to his outspoken aide generated a cringe.

Of course "useful and intelligent" would include Konovalov who was a former apprentice of Namach's and was one of the few vampires who actually carried some of the ancient's blood, making Konovalov, Hadrian, and Anandi sort-of siblings. Namach had not turned Konovalov, but he had killed the one who had (he'd had to, to get Konovalov) and had used his own blood to remove any lingering connection Vladimir might have had to the bloodline he came from. Because vampires could be somewhat controlled by their direct ancestors, and Namach really was ridiculously powerful in the vampiric magic systems, his control over those carrying his blood was much stronger than normal. He basically owned Konovalov, even though Konovalov was one of the most powerful vampires around.

Rahkesh wondered if Namach had considered taking the opportunity to get rid of a good portion of his own species. He had done it before, by going after half of them personally. But…

"If he wanted to get rid of most of the vampires the way to do it would not involve letting the demons gather a larger slave force than they already have." Rahkesh pointed out.

"We are worried about that." General Andropov said. His two comrades, whose names Rahkesh still didn't know, nodded. "Everyone we can't fit into a shelter will be captured or killed – this is a worst case scenario we're discussing – and the captured ones will be very useful to the demons."

"It might be a good idea to wipe the memories of those who helped build the shelters, should they not then get chosen to stay in them." Sharahak said.

"We're also considering mass producing a free suicide potion." The woman said.

"The werewolves have one. The pack from Los Angeles is producing and distributing it." Rahkesh said. Liam, one of the Akren student werewolves, had developed several injection systems, in case he was somehow tied up or immobilized.

"Does Akren have its own shelters?" The _still_ unnamed man asked. Rahkesh gave no outward expression; inwardly he grimaced, wondering if the Russians had invited him here just to ask that.

"Not yet. The Alumni Association has not yet decided on how best to build one, or if we should. Naturally the school's usual protections will keep us fairly secure, but they're not indestructible." Rahkesh said, lying easily. One of Konovalov's aides rolled his eyes. Rahkesh saw Konovalov blink once, the vampire behind him stiffened, then turned, took two steps, and vanished. Rahkesh wondered what would happen to him, probably nothing good.

"Should the demons come after the Academy it would be a pity to lose such a facility." Rahkesh wished he knew who this guy was. This was getting absurd.

"The demons will quickly find they have more than they can handle, should they focus on us." Rahkesh said. "It seems they are intelligent enough to try something else." He didn't want to continue that conversation. He had no instructions on what to tell or not to tell the Russians. And most everything at Akren was a secret from all outsiders all the time. "You're outer security system seems like it will be a good defense against the demons." Rahkesh said, "I'm a little concerned that we don't know enough about their magics to know if they can get through." He looked over to Sharahak.

"I suspect they will find a way through eventually. I know a lot about the magics they use in civilian life, but not much at all about what their sorcerers use in battle. None of the enchantments or spells I know of would get through what you have here, but I suspect they have some that will manage it. They got into Atlantis eventually." Sharahak pointed out. "I would suggest adding bloodmagic wards, along with thread and metal magic. The difference in their magic will mean that they to cut through rather than undo those. I don't think they can follow your magical connections well enough to get inside those. Though I may be wrong, they have some very clever sorcerers."

"I don't suppose we could get a copy of what Akren is using on their fortresses?" The small man asked dryly.

"Given that we've nothing designed against demons, it would be wasted effort." Rahkesh said calmly, wondering just who this was and who he worked for. And what made him think he could just ask questions like that.

"Have you discovered nothing from the demons whose bodies you've been studying?"

"Nothing of use to keeping them out of a place." Rahkesh answered, this time almost honest.

"So every possibility must be planned for. Have the bloodmagic wards already been activated?"

"I was unaware we had such wards." Rahkesh said dryly. "Has Moscow activated their wards?"

"Not yet."

"They'd be better off adding some metalmagic." Sharahak suggested.

"And threadmagic." Rahkesh agreed. "Demons don't have access to the fibers we do, do they?" He asked Sharahak.

"No, I don't think so." Sharahak said.

"More threadmagic and metalmagic then." Konovalov said, "you ought to contact the goblins." He told the humans. "Thank you Sharahak, Rahkesh."

The woman who had guided them in led them out again. Behind them Konovalov spun to face the smaller of the two men.

"Just what sort of death wish do you have? Trying to get information on the Akren Academy defenses?" The vampire Lord snarled. The man opened his mouth to reply, but Konovalov cut him off before he could start. "I am perfectly aware of who you work for, Viktor, and your report home _will_ include a recommendation to cease all efforts at discovering Akren's defense systems. Else _I_ will be sending you home, in a shoebox."

"My orders-"

"Are, apparently, to insult any Akren representative you meet." Konovalov snapped. "Do your superiors wish to determine what it takes to make us consider them enough of a threat to do away with?"

"Now see here-"

"None of you will be seeing much of anything from the inside of a coffin Viktor. Whatever else you are doing to determine Akren's battle readiness will end immediately." Konovalov said sharply. With a swish of his heavy cloak the vampire was gone, his aide following at once. As soon as they had vanished General Andropov also turned on his comrade.

"You dumbass. There are a million ways to go about finding out what Akren is up to. That was possibly the least subtle attempt I've ever seen."

"It would be nice to know how many they can save. If all of their graduates and students take refuge together the rest of the world loses its best fighting force."

"I should think that if anyone survives it will be them, and their chances are better together. The Alumni Association has probably already thought this through. Tell Moscow that they'd be better off asking Marvin Gale himself, rather than trying to get a student to spill anything. Did you think he'd just tell you everything they've got?"

"He might have."

"He might have thought you a threat and turned you into a pile of sludge." The General said harshly. "And we'll be getting a nasty inquiry from the AAA. You can bet that this will be reported. Marvin Gale will be in Moscow tomorrow demanding to know what we were thinking, and he'll probably have Rahkesh's memories of this to back him up. You'd best head home."

X

The Air Force General was right. Not fifteen minutes after getting back to Akren Rahkesh was in Marvin Gale's office. The werewolf Bloodmage had his office, and all of the AAA offices, in a small discreet brick building designed in a slightly Victorian style located next to one of the Akren safe houses. It was possible to access this location from dozens of points around the world, but the magical keys used to do so automatically closed everything down if the user wasn't from Akren.

Marvin was the same as Rahkesh had always seen him. Old faded jeans and a battered sweater, combat boots with the laces starting to fray. The only things not carrying an old dirty look were the vast array of bloodmetal pieces all over him. Earrings, necklace, rings, bracelets, armbands, gloves, pins, and buttons made of bloodmetal.

"I didn't tell him a damn thing!" Rahkesh snapped angrily. This was the third time Marvin had asked. The old loner werewolf was pacing in front of the larger windows that looked out onto an open meadow with a fountain of marble eagles near the house.

"They're probably just motivated by fear. Everyone is panicking about this." The other person in the room was a human. An older woman with black-streaked gray hair in a dark blue suit with large glasses perched on her nose. She was Greta Milner, the vice president of the Akren Alumni Association, a Third Tier Threadmage and, before being elected, the owner of a business that produced magical shoes. Marvin worked more on politics and finances, Greta more on the ongoing Alumni operations that included everything from wards on the safe houses, to classes offered to the public, to managing meetings between alumni business associates at secure locations, and the security side of things. Their responsibilities overlapped a lot but they had made an excellent team and had led the AAA for more than a decade.

"Be pretty dumb to not be. I'm amazed that everyone has been so calm so far. Giving the public the news that they're going to be killed or enslaved, and getting no extreme reactions yet?" Rahkesh said. He was just waiting to hear about riots. People didn't react rationally when told they were going to die a horrible death. Being told that the government was making secure bunkers, but couldn't build enough for everyone, was bound to get the conspiracy theorists up in arms over corruption in the selection process. Rahkesh just didn't understand the calm so far.

"Anyone overly given to dramatics got that over with when the plague was dropped on us." Greta replied. "Relax Marvin. Send them a suitably snarky note stating our disapproval and telling them to mind their own business."

Marvin turned back to face Rahkesh with a weary sigh.

"All right lad, sit down. I suppose the Russian Army is hardly in a position to want to attack Akren."

"Do we actually have room for all of the currents students and alumni?" Rahkesh asked. "We're getting to work on the bloodmagic wards on the subterranean complex tomorrow." He said when Marvin looked at him sharply.

"It did actually have a name at one point." Greta said, "the original was Safe House Zero, but that got dropped at some point. It was later called the Dark Annex, for some reason nobody liked it much. When I was there we just called it The Pit. I think the last graduating class to work on it renamed it The Cave. And yes, we do have room for everyone." Rahkesh was surprised, he'd expected maybe they had room for half, but everyone? The underground complex must be much larger than he'd been told.

From a side office there came a harsh chirping sound. Marvin grunted and spun away into the next room. He picked up a headset that looked like muggle headphones, with a small microphone attached to speak into, and put it on.

"It's got to be midnight there Chad, what's going on?" Marvin scratched a fingernail over a set of threads against the wall and partial silencing wards set it with a faint glitter.

Greta shrugged at Rahkesh and continued. "All the students will be working on the Cave the next few weeks. Nvara has upped our schedule. She wants it ready for use in one month." Greta said. "Most of the alumni think she's being too ambitious, but we can better prepare the wards on it with everything operational. Easier to avoid future magical conflicts. Within a month it won't matter who knows that we have that place anyway. Most of the magical governments know we have some sort of worst-case-disaster bunker. And they'll be able to remove us from all of their own efforts to decide who to save."

"REPEAT THAT!" Marvin barked suddenly, snapping the silencing wards. Rahkesh and Grate glanced over as the werewolf's face went an angry dark red. "I see. Very well. Alert all your Alumni. And Chad…do it right. Leave no one alive." Marvin dropped the headset back into its holder and crossed back into the main office in two long strides.

"You know Alastor Moody?" He asked. Rahkesh nodded. "Get back to Akren and contact him. I don't know what spies or agents he's got right now, but he'd better get them all out of Voldemort's camp before dawn. That so-called "Dark Lord" just abducted a half dozen fae, including three of ours. The fae alumni are taking him out an hour after dawn."

Rahkesh left the office, trying not to run. Behind him Marvin shut the door and turned to Greta. "We'll be receiving connections to whatever communications network they're using in the next two hours. Send out a broadcast to all of our alumni in Britain, if they want to help they should ask the Fae Council, otherwise they need to stay away."

Greta watched as Rahkesh stepped across the boundary of the wards and vanished. "Do you think he'll finally do it?"

"Yeah. The fae don't know they can't kill Voldemort. But our agent has said he's got his base warded with parselmagic. That means they need Rahkesh to get in. He'll be first in, and Namach tells me he's more than ready to take out Voldemort." Marvin grimaced, "be nice to only have one enemy to deal with. Stocklir killed off the last of the Chinese dark wizards, and Europe has finished getting their anti-magical-being seizure out of their system, by tomorrow we'll only have the demons to worry about."

X

_I hope you remember our agreement involving the evil minions._ Sygra hissed in his ear just before the portkey took.

_The one where you can kill as many as you want?_ Rahkesh teased. Soon, soon he would facing off against Voldemort, again. And this time Voldemort wasn't immortal, Rahkesh had a plan, _he_ would be on the attacking side, and he had Voldemort seriously outdone.

"I'll just mention this in passing to the fae eh?" Moody asked.

"And a thought that maybe they ought to stay away a bit, especially since they'll be killed in the backlash when Voldemort dies if they're close." Rahkesh said, it was lie, but it would keep the fae away while he worked. He had not had time to figure out exactly what to do regarding Harry Potter. He had a plan. It was rolled up into a marble attached magically to the inside of his sleeve. It was a very rough plan. And it depended upon no one being too close.

_You remember your part?_ He asked Sygra in turn.

_Yes. They can't get too close to you and I need to interrupt their vision so they only get a few glimpses. Not a problem. I have these marvelous wings…_

"Near Azkaban?" Rahkesh asked, eyeing the rough maps Moody had.

"Not anymore. His base used to be there. He took the plague as an opportunity to relocate."

"Not anywhere near Hogwarts."

"No."

Rahkesh thought this over. Voldemort, for all his supposed brilliance, was very predictable. He had never had a home but Hogwarts. He used the family mansion for a little while, but didn't bother taking care of it. His old cavern was gone. He had used Hogwarts artifacts as horcruxes. He used his ancestral graveyard to hold ceremonies. Voldemort would not go back to his orphanage, and he knew that many people knew about Riddle Manor. So that and its graveyard were out. That left Hogwarts and maybe some other place. Azkaban had been a theme because of the dementors, but that was also out. Voldemort went in for grand things and icons. Hogwarts was out of the question, and likewise the Ministry. Where else…

"I know where he is." Rahkesh said.

The small medallion Moody was wearing lit up. He picked it up and brushed a thumb across the ivory surface. "Alastor Moody."

"Mad Eye dear chap," someone said, "we're all assembled. You do have all of your people out?"

"Yes. But Voldemort's gone and warded his base with parselmagic. I've called Rahkesh Asmodaeus to take them down." Moody said, glancing over at Rahkesh. "Rahkesh has invited the third basilisk." Which was code for "Harry Potter" right now, according to the media. Rahkesh had said nothing as to his "colleague's" status. But it had been assumed easily, and slightly implied in the book he'd published.

"Ah. More humans. Rahkesh's help is, of course, always appreciated, but is the other one necessary?"

"The third shares this territory with Voldemort. I think it's a parseltongue courtesy thing." Moody said dryly.

"Very well. Where is the fortress?"

Moody turned to Rahkesh and covered the medallion with one hand. "Explain." Moody grunted.

"This is Voldemort. He is hugely predictable. What better place for grand schemes and world domination than yet another icon? The only one in the United Kingdom he can get to but hasn't used yet: Stonehenge."

Moody stared hard at Rahkesh for a moment, then slowly nodded and took his hand off the medallion. Rahkesh knew that Moody had not actually had any agents left in Voldemort's ranks, but had never let on so that he would be kept in the loop. No one from Akren was likely to ask who Moody had working for him as long as he was getting results.

"It's at Stonehenge." Moody said. There was a long string of fae cursing from the medallion.

"Wonderful! Bloody brilliant! Right in front of the muggles!"

"Whining won't change a thing Chad." Moody said. "We'll meet at the veela teleportation point nearest there?"

"Fine."

Moody dropped the medallion with a sigh. "Well?"

"Who is Chad?"

"Chadrion. Akren graduate obviously, 1965. He's a dryad. Forest based fae species, like so many are, melds with plants. Chadrion's a pine-based dryad." Moody said. "Any species of pine so he's not the most versatile dryad ever, but also not too restricted.

"Uh huh." Rahkesh said, none of that meaning anything to him. There were no dryads currently at Akren.

"He was the Captain of the Guard for the largest dryad owned forest in Europe. When the magical humans started outlawing fae he got promoted to managing all of the offensive work the Fae Council and the Tribal Elders had in mind. When the dryads got sick of dealing with the magical humans here they went and joined their cousins the dryakan in North America. While most of them were gone their mages took the opportunity to implement some amazing new wards on the forests – they needed them to be empty you see, so they couldn't do it earlier. Chad stayed in the only remnant unwarded forest to defend those who couldn't leave, to protect the mages making the new wards, and to ensure that the magical humans stayed out of their forests. He's been pretty effective."

"Hope he likes dementors." Rahkesh said.

"Alastor." The communicator medallion chirped.

"Yes?"

"Lord Hadrian is coming with a few of his guards, to observe, not to interfere. Except he wants rights to any captured vampires. The Master of Paris might show up at some point along with the Master of Berlin and the Master of Vienna, but the last one is unlikely and they've promised to stay out of this. They just want to know Voldemort and his followers are truly dead."

"Got it." Moody said. "Not surprising, Voldemort just about blew France apart the last time around." He turned the communicator off, grabbing Rahkesh's shoulder he apparated both of them to the meeting point.

A carved stone picnic table with worn stone benches was the only marker of the veela apparition point. That and a circle of very old maples. The picnic table was covered with inlaid colored marble chips in swirling designs, muggle repelling magic in a veela runic form.

"Tell them I'm going ahead." Rahkesh said, getting nervous. Moody gave his shoulder a squeeze.

"You can end him easy."

"I'm not worried about that."

"I know. Go ahead, I'll keep them outside until the last possible moment. Signal if you run into real trouble. I'll recognize either of your magical signals." Moody said, telling Rahkesh that he could contact him telepathically in either identity if he needed to.

"The other is getting harder and harder to do. I'm glad this will be the last time. I'm losing the old signature." Rahkesh said.

"You know Stonehenge?"

"No. Mind giving me a site?" Rahkesh asked. Moody nodded, slowly he lowered his mental shields. Rahkesh dropped in with a touch of mind magic. He wasn't very good at this, but he caught the image Moody was projecting, and apparated.

Rahkesh felt the wards hesitantly. They hissed. Rahkesh didn't touch them enough to trigger them, just to ascertain that they were parselmagic. He also checked the ground for spellwork. Two paces to the north magics were laid into the ground. Moody's location had been very precise.

He could see the tops of Stonehenge, just over the horizon. Rahkesh had never been here before. It was still more than an hour until dawn and he could see no one else about. It was also about to start raining. Rahkesh took a deep breath, and smelled the storm approaching. Dimly he heard wings beat and feathers rustle. This was no ordinary storm coming. This was a storm to shake the earth apart. A giant thunderstorm filled with energy and flaring air currents. Rahkesh breathed in again and smiled as he filled with a rush of magic. This time he found the thunderbird's apparently endless destructive nature, and let it hover just outside his senses, ready for the fight. Perfect. He could not have asked for better conditions. And there would be no muggles for a long way around. Not right now. The fae had cleared them out that night. And no sane person would be about in weather like what Rahkesh could feel racing towards him.

Know he had a few minutes Rahkesh slowly began to feed the storm. Energy in the form of electricity and waves of hot and cold slowly pouring out of his magic. The clouds above got even darker and started to visibly grow. The breeze carried everything up and away and Rahkesh sent it all swirling skywards by imagining the massive wings of the thunderbird, formed of raw magic, hurling energy and heat into the storm.

Rahkesh opened his eyes. Horizon to horizon the sky was black. There should have been some light just starting to show. But it was black as full night. He could not see where the earth ended and the clouds began. Perfect. The storm's energy needed to be released, and Rahkesh shivered in anticipation of channeling all of that into his animagus. He held back only by reminding himself that Voldemort needed to go first, then he could celebrate.

Rahkesh hadn't had much time to learn parselmagic. Many decades less than Voldemort had. All the same his abilities seemed to be more intact; Voldemort probably hadn't known much about the parselmagic's real purpose until he'd read Rahkesh's book. He'd taught himself all of this. This, truly, was an incredible feat of learning and magic. Then again Voldemort was supposed to be brilliant.

Gingerly Rahkesh examined the wards in front of him. He slipped into the snakemagic and felt his vision change just a little, then his magical senses. He could feel the wards, and almost see them. In a way it was like seeing – the field looked like it was covered in writhing, twisting magic, but he couldn't actually see it. As the magic and human senses merged Rahkesh blinked and finally could truly see it.

Voldemort may have done an excellent job, but it was clear at once that his abilities were in far worse condition than Rahkesh's. This was probably a matter of luck as much as anything else, considering their respective childhoods. Rahkesh was sure that if Voldemort had ever found a learning environment like Akren his full abilities might have exceeded Rahkesh's. As it was all he'd had was Hogwarts and an abusive awful orphanage.

Rahkesh found the holes in the wards and slipped through. Following the hissing and rustling of the parselmagic he sank inwards. Voldemort's base was far below ground. With an exit that connected magically to a forest…somewhere rather nearer to Hogwarts. Rahkesh sent the news of the second exit to Moody with a quick thought. Moody would send some of the fae (they were mostly nature-based after all) to take care of that.

Inside Rahkesh smelled out the basilisk magic, keeping himself far away from it to avoid alerting Voldemort to his presence. Following the magical lines Rahkesh found a point where many crossed. Here he settled into his basilisk self, and gently wrapped the magic in his own parselmagic. Then he gently lifted the ward pieces and placed them away, in a corner.

A gaping opening formed around him as the wards peeled away. Rahkesh was sweating heavily as he moved the wards slowly and gently. No jarring or bumping, no quick moves. Slow constant pressure. His fingernails were biting into palms almost enough to draw blood.

Finally Rahkesh had all of the edges of the wards. Voldemort should have done a full bubble all around his underground fortress, but maybe he hadn't noted the openings. Now Rahkesh pulled at the wards as if they were made of elastic, pulling them away from the opening and wrapping them backwards around themselves. To avoid Voldemort noting the increased magic drain he located the horcrux he carried. It was easier to find when his mind was in the parselmagic. Rahkesh had never noticed that before. The bleeding blackened wreck came into his vision, giving off a gold glow, and a dark reeking stench. It hadn't smelled before. This was probably an effect of his mind being "snake-like" at the moment.

Rahkesh sent magic through the horcrux, it emerged still in his mind, but feeling as if it were Voldemort's. He sent it into the wards. Now the wards contained both his magic and Voldemort's, except Rahkesh's was disguised.

The wards finally flipped inside out. Rahkesh pulled them away and began to draw his magic out, shrinking them. Then he pulled Voldemort's connections inward until the wards were a small bundle on the ground a few meters from him. Leave some of his magic inside Rahkesh went back to the original outline of the wards. Where the wards had been he could sense the basic outline as if it were still pressed into the air and ground. Tying the wards to their starting point Rahkesh made sure he could put them back as they had been in seconds. It would be like releasing a spring; they would snap out again and flip to fill the places they had been set at.

With the wards gone a set of door appeared, great black iron things covered with carved black iron snakes. How predictable.

_Sygra? Can you sense the other side? _Rahkesh asked, aware that his familiar's natural heat-sensing and smelling abilities might be better than magic here.

_Yes. It is empty._

Rahkesh checked the door over for spells quickly, finding many locking enchantments that could be activated if Voldemort wished. But none we active right then. Rahkesh gauged the strength of the spells, and decided that he could break them if he had to, if they were activated. Especially since the last horcrux should be gone and Voldemort might be incapacitated by the loss of Rahkesh's soul piece, forcing his soul to fill in the gap.

Pushing the door open Rahkesh pulled on the magic of the Yeck cap he had claimed before even arriving at Akren. Instantly he felt himself go invisible. Vey useful thing that.

Long shadows stretched across a massive stone hall. A huge stone throne stood at one end, the floors open. Smaller chars were near the throne and more along the walls. There was a full body's worth of blood on the floor in the middle of the hall.

_Such an artistic interior decorator ._Sygra mused softly.

Rahkesh opened up all of his bloodmagic enhanced senses. Smell, sight, hearing and magic, he deliberately kept the runes from glowing as the magic appeared. Normally they would have flashed gold briefly, then faded. He couldn't risk that now.

The hall was empty, and so dark that it took Rahkesh several seconds to find the doors at the end. One door behind the throne, one back to both sides, and a pair of larger doors on the wall to his left. Rahkesh selected the door behind the throne and, after checking the spells to assure that they were no worse than those on the main entry door, opened it.

Again darkness, then torches lit along either wall, leading away into darkness. Rahkesh checked the spells on the torches, and was relieved to find that while they were designed to light up when someone entered, they did not send any signal to anything or anyone. Poor planning that.

The hallway ended in three doors in a semicircle. Rahkesh, sick of wandering around, and knowing the fae were coming, smelled out Voldemort with his parselmagic. The other basilisk had most recently entered the middle one. Rahkesh examined it, then followed. Inwardly he began to isolate the horcrux within himself. He had only had a few hours to prepare, but it was well closed off. Now he shut it off completely and began preparing to funnel power into an internal killing curse.

Inside the door was a plain rectangle room. One door was at the end, one off the left wall. Rahkesh paused, confused. There was…_more than one parselmouth_?

Rahkesh froze as his senses verified that yes, indeed, there were multiple parselmouths behind the left door.

How was this possible? Voldemort was the only other he knew about, apart from that one little boy. How could Voldemort have found more…from the smell many more…without anyone knowing?

They were young, Rahkesh realized suddenly. None of these had snake forms, and they _smelled_ young.

With a sick feeling sinking into his stomach Rahkesh opened the left side door.

Inside were cages, six of them. Inside each was a child, curled under a small blanket. Rahkesh paused, but felt no traps or wards. Children, parselmouths all.

A head appeared from under the nearest blanket. A little girl, maybe eight, blond hair that was filthy. She was looking around, frightened and confused. Rahkesh dropped his invisibility. She gasped in surprised and fear. Rahkesh knelt and raised a finger to his lips, indicating silence, and winked. The little girl just stared, drawing away.

Now what? Voldemort had collection of parselmouths children, obviously not his. Rahkesh expected a violent battle, and he expected he and/or Voldemort might actually transform, either into basilisk or Rahkesh into a thunderbird. How could he keep these ones safe?

The children were all awake now, all watching him, looking very frightened. Rahkesh smiled gently at them and winked again, indicating silence once more. What was he supposed to do about this? All of them looked very weak and underfed, cold and probably (their smells told him) a little sick from the damp cages. Probably kidnapped, or their parents dead from the plague.

Rahkesh reached out to Moody, finding the ex-auror's mind he sent an image of what he was seeing. And got a snarl of pure fury in response. He didn't know Moody's animagus, but it was just about roaring at the sight of the abducted caged children. Rahkesh dimly realized his own magic was going crazy, the parselmagic instinctively ready to fight and kill to protect other parselmouths. But if he was feel an overwhelming urge to kill the one who had harmed these parselmouths, how had Voldemort been able to actually do such a thing?

He needed to do something, anything. Voldemort would sense him any minute. The wards were wide open and the fae alumni army couldn't be far off. Rahkesh needed to do something, but he had no way to get them all out.

Finally Rahkesh drew his knife, making a shallow cut on his palm he walked into the room, and drew a thin line of blood around the cages, which were placed in a close circle on the floor. The cages, he noted, were just far enough apart that the children could not reach each other. The bloodline completed he left it at that. This was his own knife, the one he had made, and Rahkesh had poured its power into the blood drawn by its blade.

"Who are you?"

It was a little boy, maybe seven. Rahkesh crouched beside him.

"My name's Rahkesh. I'm here to get you out of this place."

"How?" The boy asked, seeming strangely calm.

"Magic." Rahkesh said with a faint smile. "It's okay, you'll be out of here very soon. But I need to make sure the bad man who brought you here is gone so he can't hurt you. I need you to stay very quiet while I go make sure he's gone, can you do that?" He received six uncertain nods.

Rahkesh slipped back out the door, leaving it open a crack. Smelled the air and reaching out magically he sensed Voldemort, somewhere a ways behind the remaining door.

From his belt holster Rahkesh removed one of his surprises. A muggle handgun. Very ordinary, very small, and very much outside what Voldemort would expect. Holding the gun away from himself Rahkesh drew his wand and cast three layers of shields around himself. Then he opened the two vials on his belt, scratching a finger on the sharp edge of a small pin he wore on his shoulder, in the likeness of a thunderbird, he dripped the blood into each vial.

Smoke rose, wrapping him, then turning green and blue. Rahkesh flicked a wandless activation spell and the two vials poured out their shield enchantments. Potions enchantments were not something Rahkesh knew anything about, so he'd had to buy both. Wandless shielding was another matter, and Rahkesh began to weave power reinforcements into the magic around him to redirect spells around himself, which was less stressful than simply stopping them.

Inside the door was a comfortable office with wood paneling on the walls over the rough stone, bookcases, chairs, a massive desk, a mirror, and a fancy arrangement of torches and candles. It was empty.

Then the tangy venomous reek of basilisk magic hit Rahkesh's nose. The door to the next room was open.

"CRUCIO!"

Rahkesh, already on edge, ducked instantly. Too late he sensed the ward on the ceiling just outside the office that he'd missed. Rolling away from a barrage of blue and yellow spells he rolled to his feet.

Voldemort stood in the open doorway. Rahkesh registered his furious shock before a wave of black magics was hurled at him.

Lightning exploded, Rahkesh caught the soul-rotting spell in a fist of parselmagic and hurled it back.

Ducking a killing curse Rahkesh spun and used a fireball to eat the next spell sent after him. Two bone shattering spells blasted apart the wall near his head. Rahkesh summoned Voldemort's heart. Voldemort shrugged the spell off.

Spiraling whips of black sparkling magic shrieked towards Rahkesh. Voldemort's horcrux woke up with Voldemort's proximity. Rahkesh sent the black magic spinning aside with a deflection spell, lifted the gun, and fired twice.

The gun melted as a red spell hit it. Voldemort staggered away with a shriek, clutching his right arm.

Searing pain lashed through Rahkesh's head, making him stumble. He had forgotten the pain of that old scar. Grimly he let himself fall to the floor, avoiding a killing curse, sent lefthanded.

As a second killing curse flew just past his head Rahkesh fell inward.

_AVADA KEDAVRA_

The inward spell lanced through his mind and slammed into the horcrux. Rahkesh's mind was filled with green light.

Someone was screaming. Rahkesh lurched to his feet, ready to fight.

Voldemort was on his knees, screaming.

Blackness tugged at Rahkesh's vision and he felt the collapse coming as the horcrux died out of him, leave a gaping hole in his soul.

Voldemort's screaming rose and Rahkesh staggered against the desk. A soul-deep pull formed, feeling like his heart was being pulled from his chest Rahkesh choked, trying to concentrate as his soul fragment broke free of Voldemort and soared back to him. The vacuum in him dragging it away.

Lightning crashed through the room, blasting everything to ash. Hissing magic rose, swirling around the two parseltongues. Rahkesh, deep in his own mind, imagining his own soul found a hissing venom and wild raging bird filled with lightning.

The thunderbird woke fully. Blinding light washed through the room, then out into the hallway, and into the main hall, and out.

Magic crashed through the fortress, the very edge of Rahkesh's senses going with it. He felt the fae, locked in a basement cell block. Rahkesh memorized their presence, and forced his animagus to acknowledge that they would not be harmed. In his mind he drew walls of lightning, flashing and crashing but strong as basilisk scales, encircling the fae prisoners, three of which were children…which explained why the adults, despite being Akren trained, had been captured.

Then the magic tore outwards again, too much to contain and too wild, in the nature of Rahkesh's soul, to follow even his orders.

Outside the advancing fae and vampires stopped dead as the sky opened up and millions of lightning bolts lanced into the earth. The ground boiled and rolled, turf exploding into showers of ash and sparks. Black clouds dropped lower and began to spin. Lightning lit up the dark field, enclosing everything in a wild array of shrieking crackling magic enhanced electricity. Strong shields were the only things that saved any of the fae as rippling spinning waves of lightning flew through the air and earth. Above writhing lines of lightning wrapped around each other and danced across the sky.

Rahkesh saw the soul fragment flying towards him, bright and sending crackling waves of energy away in all directions, sharp edged and ragged. Inside thunderstorms spun away and whirled like galaxies.

Rahkesh pulled himself together and felt for death. Knowing it as he did he drew upon the memories, his breathing slowed, his heartbeat began to stutter painfully. He could not kill his own soul so easily as he had Voldemort's.

Instead he found the wound left by Voldemort's horcrux, and found the pulling vortex and had dragged it into death, and followed.

Rahkesh collapsed, unaware that his body had gone perfectly still as his mind crossed over, dragging the wild soul fragment with it.

Darkness enveloped him, then light so bright he couldn't see. Rahkesh tried to shut his eyes, but they were already closed. Then he saw the soul fragment, still coming at him, but slower now as it was pulled back by the gap in Voldemort. But it was still his soul. Rahkesh latched on magically with every bit of willpower he could find, and _pulled_.

As the soul fragment hesitated Rahkesh drew his knife again, and stabbed it into Voldemort's heart.

Voldemort's body arched, screaming silently. The knife instantly fatally wrecking his soul. Rahkesh yanked on his soul fragment, now forcing its motion both through Voldemort's body and with his won mind.

The soul fragment darted across, into death. Rahkesh, hanging on tightly, swung. His mind went back and the soul went spinning away and vanished in a shower of darkness.

Rahkesh woke screaming. He had never felt such pain as his soul died. The agony woke the survival instincts of his animagus.

_Transform._ Sygra said firmly, dropping away.

_The children!_

_Are safe from you. TRANSFORM_! Sygra hissed urgently.

Rahkesh let it go. His body felt like it was vaporizing as magic spilled out of him. Dropping his solid human form massive wings unfurled. Voldemort's fortress shattered and melted around them as lightning ripped through the rock and magic.

The thunderbird exploded out of the earth, expanding rapidly, shrouded in black clouds and furious snapping lights. Rahkesh let the animal's instincts take over as he felt for his own soul.

The wound would need to be shut into a tight controlled tunnel before his entire soul drained across into death. Rahkesh wrapped lightning around and around the connection, tightening the bolts into a long tunnel between life and death with his magic flowing freely both ways, but no longer sliding off.

Death eaters ran out of the wreckage of the fortress. The storm cut them down as soon as they were above ground. The watching fae and vampires had nothing left to kill as lightning bolts zapped each fleeing man and woman through the head, exploding their brains or sending them into lethal convulsions. The endless destructive fury of the thunderbird reveled in the slaughter, screaming its delight and power.

Rahkesh finished, his soul contained. Drawing back into his own mind a feeling of horrible weakness followed. This was his remaining soul struggling to expand and fill in to cover him completely. Rahkesh, strangely exhausted, drew in the frenzied killing power of the storm and channeled it into his soul.

The watchers saw the storm changing, turning into a swirling vortex of black clouds and dazzling lightning, the thunderbird at its center. The lightning built and built, spinning wildly around the thunderbird. Then, all at once, the lightning broke free and shot inwards. The thunderbird's entire body lit up, a massive black shadow behind the clouds, wreathed in lightning. Lightning filled every feather and fell inwards. Rahkesh, soaring on a wave of adrenaline, felt his pain and exhaustion shift to almost unbearable frenzied energy and strength.

In the ruins of his fortress Voldemort stumbled upright, blood gushing from his ruined chest, but amazingly alive. His skin, brittle and damaged by the magic expended keeping the remnant of his soul intact, was falling apart in bloody lesions.

Rahkesh twisted and soared down. Fae and vampires dove for cover as the massive ethereal lightning filled form tore through the clouds, raging storms of lightning flying before it.

Rahkesh found the circle of blood he'd drawn around the caged children. It glowed, and within everything was fine, and undamaged island in a sea of destruction. And he saw Voldemort, pulling himself to his feet.

Rahkesh hit the ground, lightning flashed and roared, the thunderbird screamed and Rahkesh forced himself back into his human form. He drew the knife again, and pressed it into his skin.

All of his bloodmagic woke, and Rahkesh drew it all to the surface. Runes flared across his skin in an array of dim golden light. Rahkesh dragged the knife tip through his skin, connecting the healing runes with the strength with the speed with his most recent two, the magic directing and focusing runes.

Now came his trick, Rahkesh drew a small marble and dropped it to the ground. Red light boomed in a powerful blast, obscuring everything. Inside a two dimensional illusion-figure appeared.

Rahkesh conjured, a massive ghostly serpent. A basilisk, easily the size of his own and only barely see-through. He wrapped it around the illusion-Harry and stepped away.

When Voldemort turned he found himself faced with Rahkesh, and with Harry Potter. Harry Potter was wrapped in a ghostly hissing basilisk, and Rahkesh was channeling the full powers of the thunderbird. Lightning rippled and flashed above and around him like a pair of giant wings and the sky above shot down lightning into the ground around him.

A thunderous roared made Rahkesh turn, and grin. Sygra in full wyvern form was in the air. The large wyvern basilisk twisted, wings beating, and turned earthward. Voldemort gaped as she landed, wings still raised, her twisting snake body interrupting anyone watching them.

The last of the death eaters attacked. Rahkesh dodged their spells and turned to fight. Sygra got there first. Her powerful head knocked two aside, her spines impaling them. Her jaws closed around a third, crushing him and biting him in half. The forth she sprayed her poisonous acidic venom across. Screaming the man dissolved, curled up, and died. Sygra twisted, wing claws ripping the guts out of another fleeing man, and crushed two more people with her tail. The rest were almost out of range. Sygra's wings nearly hit the ground as she dove, spraying venom all over them. Her tailed writhed in between the battle and the watchers, blocking their view. That done she swung back around behind Rahkesh.

Rahkesh drew his wand.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Voldemort twisted, fast on his feet despite his wounds, but Rahkesh's bloodmagic was flying through him surging across every nerve and through his mind. The curse hit full on, as did the second and third ones. Voldemort froze as they hit one after the other. He struggled against them, mouth open, eyes bulging. Rahkesh drew upon his newest bloodmagic and brought up all his hate and anger, all the raw fury of a parselmouth seeking vengeance on a being that had harmed parselmouths, and put it into a final killing curse.

The magic gave off no light as it ripped free of Rahkesh's body. His wand exploded with the force of the magic, the explosion tearing his hand apart. Perfectly aimed and with all its power contained inside, none falling off in light or heat, the curse struck Voldemort full in the face.

His ruined hand pouring blood from where his exploding wand had ripped the flesh to the bone Rahkesh focused, and created short beam of green light from his illusion-person to Voldemort.

Voldemort toppled to the ground, dead.

Sygra rolled, snapping her wings around, and the ghostly basilisk shuddered, but the illusion held.

Rahkesh, feeling like his hand had been cut off, turned slightly to find the fae and vampires.

_Your arm!_ Sygra hissed in alarm.

_Not now. Fly up a bit?_

_But-_

_Sygra please. Later._

Sygra lifted, beating huge wings. Rahkesh moved aside a little, so that as the wyvern moved the watchers saw the person who had cast the killing curses, and Rahkesh. Separate. Sygra's perfect timing of her movements meant that everyone had seen that last burst of green magic from the illusion, and now they could see Rahkesh standing apart from it, in the opposite direction from where the first two killing curses had originated.

Feeling the blood draining from him, and realizing dimly that he was bleeding to death, Rahkesh turned, and gave the illusion a short bow. At his mental command, it bowed back. Rahkesh used a special spell he had designed to cancel the illusion. A bright burst of blue light, and the figure and the basilisk around him vanished.

Rahkesh turned back to the watchers. The fae were almost beside him already. The vampires were a little to the side and a behind, closer but just watching everything. Moody, despite his limp, arrived first.

"Nicely done…where'd he go?"

"As per our agreement, he doesn't have to deal with the aftermath." Rahkesh whispered, feeling faint. The fae nearest nodded, glancing at the now empty patch of ground. Others rushed past Rahkesh, into the remains of the fortress. "In the second basement level, they're fine." Rahkesh called, his voice shaking.

One of the fae alumni moved forward quickly, taking Rahkesh's torn arm. "What happened?

"My wand shattered." Rahkesh said, swaying on his feet. He sensed the Akren signal, "all of ours are fine." He added. All of these fae were from Akren. "There're a bunch of children in there. In cages. Parselmouth children."

"We'll get them out." Moody said at once as Rahkesh's legs began to give out. The fae beside him helped lower Rahkesh to the ground and began casting healing spells.

The thunderbird roared, the earth shook under the force of the rumble of thunder. It didn't yet trust fae. Rahkesh forced it back. Lightning skittered across his skin. Rahkesh leaned away from the fae, who jumped out of the way as lightning rippled through him. Rahkesh drew his bloodied knife again, and activated his healing bloodmagics. Golden runes blazed across his skin, flaring brightly. Lightning bolts ripped through the air, striking Rahkesh and sliding into the runes, wrapping him in a golden glow.

Under the lightning Rahkesh's body jerked helplessly, the electrocution impossible to control. It felt amazing, better than anything he'd ever felt. It hurt more than any pain he'd ever experienced. Rahkesh found his injured arm and hand, noting what the damage was he began to repair it. Lightning bolts lashed into his body and twisted through the bloodmagic and into his injuries, energizing and closing them. Rahkesh drew on his knowledge of healing spells to close the wounds as his bloodmagic focused the effort.

The final sparks faded from his hand and Rahkesh rolled over. His hand was healed, remaining was an amazing array of lightning-like scars that crisscrossed the skin, splintered and reformed, like real lightning.

He was alive, Voldemort was dead. Part of his soul was dead, but he survived. Rahkesh grinned broadly and raised his uninjured hand. Moody eyed him for as long moment, then pulled his to his feet.

"Some display."

"I think…I might faint." Rahkesh said, swaying a little.

The freed fae were coming towards them. Other fae were coming out too, carrying the six children.

The vampires finally approached, Rahkesh noted that apart from Hadrian there were three other City Masters were present. These must be from Paris, Vienna, and Berlin.

"Where did the other basilisk go?" the Master of Berlin asked curiously.

"I didn't ask." Rahkesh sighed, "actually we've never spoken at all." His vision was spotty, and fading in and out. He could hear his heartbeat too loudly.

The fae had their injured out now, and healers examining them.

"Everyone alive?" Rahkesh asked. He certainly didn't feel alive. He felt weak, terribly weak, probably from blood loss.

"Very much so, thank you Rahkesh." One of them said gratefully. "How did you keep that explosion from hitting them?"

"They were trained at Akren." Rahkesh replied with a painful shrug. "I'm not sure I _could _have hurt them accidentally." That was probably not true, but it would work in his favor.

"And, as always, we defend each other." One of the other fae agreed. He winked, "please let the other basilisk know how grateful we are." Rahkesh nodded tiredly. This one had probably guessed what an act he'd put on.

Sudden flashes of light startled everyone. Rahkesh spun, froze, and cursed in parseltongue as he saw several reporters lined up several meters away. His feet were unbalanced, and his knees didn't want to support him. His arm hurt. And a nausea-like headache had began.

"How the hell did they know what was happening?" Rahkesh hissed, unaware that his eyes were half closed and he was starting to tremble.

"Rahkesh that whole fight took half an hour." Moody said. "Be a little hard to miss the magic flying everywhere."

"Are you Rahkesh Asmodaeus?" One of the reporters shouted, running towards him. Behind him came a camera man and another reporter. Rahkesh resisted the urge to kill them all.

"Yes."

"Oh wow! We've been waiting for the chance to speak to you-"

"And haven't gotten it since _I_ do not wish to speak to _you_." Rahkesh snapped. Lightning crashed overhead. Sensing Rahkesh was not totally in control, and about to collapse and therefore feeling like he might be in danger, Moody stepped in front of him.

Rahkesh turned away to find the parselmouth children. He'd have to find out if any of their parents were alive, though he was almost certain none were. Then he'd have to get them to Mr. Ramdas in India. Rahkesh moved too fast and his vision started to go black. A cold wind swept through him.

"Dementors!" The fae who was probably the one in charge called. The three reporters tried to flee, the fae stunned them. Forming a tight circle around the injured they began a spell.

Rahkesh let the fae deal with the dementors. He had no energy left to fight and his soul ached. Instead he found the shivering frightened children, a little ways off. A dozen vampires were nearby, apparently keeping an eye on them. Rahkesh didn't like that. Some of these children had fully intact abilities. They'd make extremely valuable followers for any City Master. Ignoring his mounting head ache Rahkesh made his way over to them, giving the vampires a suspicious look.

"If no one can find their guardians…" One of the vampires began.

"Try it and die." Rahkesh hissed, shouldering past him. Behind him Hadrian turned a laugh into a cough. Further back a shadow, almost invisible against the black sky and earth, chuckled darkly.

"I've already read their minds." The vampire stated, "most of their parents are dead, but I don't know about that one." He added, nodding to the little blond girl. Rahkesh turned on him, hissing, lightning crashing.

"_You read their minds!_" He roared, parselmouth instincts going into a protective overdrive.

"Why not?" The vampire persisted. Rahkesh closed his eyes wearily, forcing himself not to attack.

"Did it occur to your dead rotting brain that maybe, just maybe, reading the mind of one parselmouth might make the others JUST A LITTLE ANGRY?" Rahkesh said, ending in a shout. Lightning wrapped around his hands and thunder crashed overhead, Rahkesh moved, lightning flashing, forcing the vampires to dodge aside as he placed himself between them and the children.

"Rahkesh!" Moody called, seeing a fight starting.

Rahkesh snarled. Moody blinked, then, slowly, grinned at the wary vampires, and backed away. "If one of you animated corpses gets one step closer to them it'll be the last thing you do." He warned, hissing. Sygra, still in wyvern form, settled onto the ground beside him, forcing the vampires near here out of her way.

"If they don't have families or guardians-" The vampire began again.

Rahkesh hurled a lightning bolt at him. Lightning exploded out around and shrieked down from the sky in twisting spirals. Blinded by the light everyone fell dodged aside.

Wreathed in lightning Rahkesh couldn't stop the transformation. His parselmagic had risen, furious. His ribs snapped and reformed, his limbs vanished. As the dazzling lightning displays rolled back the vampires were faced with a hissing basilisk, lightning dancing across his shining scales.

"Parselmouths are rather…protective…of other parselmouths." Moody said gently into the stunned silence as Rahkesh raised his head, displaying all his venom dripping fangs, and leaned out menacingly towards the small group of vampires. Off to the side the Master of Paris, a tall, thin, blond haired vampire with icy green eyes, chuckled softly. His chosen heir was a parselmouth, he probably knew all about their fierce protectiveness of each others. But he made no move to help his fellow Lord.

Of the dozen vampires eleven backed away, far away, and moved aside. The remaining one had been the one talking all along, and was clearly their leader. Probably the Master of Vienna, Rahkesh decided.

"Damn it! It's not like they have much of future now." The City Master snarled, angry now. He moved forwards gesturing to the children. "They have no families, no homes. We take orphans all the time. You have no right to-"

Rahkesh struck, fangs flashing, lightning ripped from the basilisk's body and shot into the vampire, who dodged his fangs smoothly. Rahkesh's scales twisted, razor sharp edges outwards. He spun and slammed a long coil into the vampire. Lightning ripped away the vampire's shield and his spells shimmered harmlessly along Rahkesh's scales and fell aside. Rahkesh hissed and released a spray of venom. The vampire ducked and blasted it away.

From above Rahkesh's fury fueled the raging temper of the thunderbird. Lightning shot down, coating every scale on the snake. The clouds shimmered and began to drop, lightning twisting down. The wind picked up and in seconds a howling gale had formed. The dementors and fae fled as a crackling tornado of lightning plunged out of the black sky and blasted the earth apart.

Rahkesh struck, snake-speed darting back and forth, dodging curses powerful enough to damage even a basilisk. Threadmagic shattered one of his fangs as he clipped the City Master in passing. The tornado hit the earth beside his head. Rahkesh grabbed the entire thing and pulled.

The tornado turned into a wave of rolling writhing lightning bolts, washing over Rahkesh, gathering energy from his scales, vaporizing the venom he forced through his skin. Within the wall of lightning the air became poisonous and acidic.

Rahkesh flung himself forward, turning sideways, lightning disrupting all magic. The City Master couldn't dodge the basilisk's entire body, blinded and unable to apparate he cast a shield spell and tried to duck. The lightning leaped off of Rahkesh and crashed into him.

His newest bloodmagics were fully operational, even in snake form. Rahkesh directed the lightning, tearing apart layer after layer of shields, spells, enchantments, threadmagic, wards, and bloodmetal. Focusing in on the vampire's body he poured venom into the lightning and shoved it into the vampire.

Screaming and writhing the vampire fought, trying to free himself. Basilisk venom sunk into his skin and burned inwards, lightning tore at his flesh and shot through his brain.

Bloodmagic exploded, Rahkesh spun aside as the vampiric magics tore into his neck. The City Master collected the lightning and venom, and ripped it out of himself. Flinging it away he unleashed a massive fireball.

As a basilisk Rahkesh was too large to dodge it all, he transformed. In less than a second he was human again, dropping to his knees and feeling the hair on the top of his head turn to ash as the fire streaked overhead. Pulling back his magics Rahkesh rose to his feet and planted himself between the children and the vampire, and waited.

The air cleared, the gale died down, the lightning shimmered away into the clouds and the thunder became less constant. The gasping, bleeding Master of Vienna paused, facing Rahkesh across a few meters of ground.

Rahkesh was ready to collapse. The magic induced anger at danger to parselmouths had fed his energy, but even that wasn't enough to keep him going any longer. He had lost too much to death in the fight to destroy his and Voldemort's souls. He'd lost far too much blood and his energy was drained from sending his mind into death and then forcing it back.

He ignored all of this, determined to put on a good front. Instead he straightened, calmed his breathing, grateful for the darkness of the storm, which hid how pale and shaky he was. He let his bloodmagics become just barely visible, a faint golden glow. He wrapped his magics tightly around him, and waited.

The Master of Vienna was a bloody wreck. His skin had been flayed off and burned to ash by the lightning. The basilisk venom was destroying his body from the inside out. He was blind from the lightning attacking his brain, his magical channels badly damaged. Bones showed through on his left arm where the flesh had been entirely removed. Despite this he was visibly healing, and his bloodmagic glowed strong. Rahkesh, sensing the vampire's magics, realized with a tired resignation that the vampire was in much better condition than he was. His body and magics would soon overcome the basilisk venom. The internal damage might remain for some time, but most of it would be healed soon. He didn't need his vision to fight. And his far greater age meant better developed magical channels, even with all the damage he could compensate with bloodmagic and threadmagic. Despite any physical injures, his magics were far more intact that Rahkesh's were.

Rahkesh realized slowly that if the fight continued, he would probably not win. He concealed this knowledge, letting lightning spark across his skin and hiss of the basilisk close around him. If necessary he could turn into a thunderbird again. In that form he might outlast the vampire, especially with this storm overhead. And in that form he could probably access the basilisk enough to turn all his magic fully poisonous. Even if he eventually lost, there wouldn't be much left of the vampire, if he survived. And, if absolutely necessary, Rahkesh could use his newest connection to death and drag what remained alive of the vampire across. Rahkesh might survive that, probably not, but he could at the very least take the vampire with him.

Rahkesh walked forwards until he and the vampire were face to face.

"If you ever, and I do mean _ever_, make an attempt at turning a healthy parselmouth child into a vampire again, I will kill you and destroy your soul. And there is no power on this earth that will stop me." Rahkesh said in a soft voice between a growl and hiss.

Turning his back on the staring vampire Rahkesh walked away. Using anger to keep himself steady he went to the children, collecting them all in a levitating spell Rahkesh touched the portkey he always carried, and activated it.

The portkey took him through four places in London, Rahkesh stripping off any tracking charms as he went, before landing at a cottage long owned by the Potters.

On the suddenly empty battlefield and sky began to clear of the black clouds and sunlight starting coming through. The vampires started leaving at once. Lord Hadrian paused, turning to watch a shadow that rippled in and out of existence in between sun and shadow.

"Do you think he'll live?"

"He'll live." Tristan Namach answered softly. "And he'll manage the final transformation." The oldest vampire sounded resigned. Hadrian winced sympathetically.

"Surely with the demons attacking he will be overlooked?"

"Highly unlikely." Tristan replied dryly. "Not after the last one. However, should he last long enough, we may actually gain something this time around."

"Do you really think it will be enough?"

"Possibly. Probably. They've been waiting a long time for Earth."

"But even if he is enough, they won't want what he'll become. Not after the last one." Hadrian said. Tristan grinned in a wolfish manner, glowing eyes and white fangs showing through the shadows hiding him.

"Too bad for them."

Hadrian looked back over to the bloody vampire, who was staggering as he apparated away. "Should we kill him?"

"No. No need. He won't be making that mistake again." Tristan said.

"Will you invite Rahkesh to be your next apprentice?" Hadrian asked.

"Yes." Tristan said. Hadrian grimaced.

"Better start preparing. You're going to have the fight of the millennia on your hands to keep him when they find out what he is."

"As I am certain you are aware" Tristan drawled, "I have dealt with _that_ threat before. Quite adequately too." The shadowy form rippled out of existence.

The Master of Paris, who had also lingered, stepped in beside Hadrian as they apparated back to the Master of London's mansion to prepare a press release.

"It seems the parselmouths have a new leader." The thin blond vampire mused, drawing a sharp look from Hadrian, followed by a groan as Hadrian realized what that meant and forwarded the thought to his Master. Tristan's muffled growl was audible to both vampires, making the French vampire laugh.

X

**18,000+** **words**. Longest chapter I've ever written. Do not expect another like it. But I did say in the last one that I would make this all one chapter.

Please Review!

So yeah, trying to preserve the species in bunkers. I've giving up trying to write scenes of the chaos and panic that would ensue if anything like that actually happened – I can't write anything crazy enough.


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

"All right that hurt." Rahkesh said, wincing. He was stretched out on a couch in Professor Namach's sitting room. The three thousand year old vampire was sitting in a jewel encrusted armchair beside him, trying to assess just what damage remained from Rahkesh's amateur necromancy/soul magic.

Rahkesh's vision slowly returned from the swirling fog he'd been in while Namach worked. Letting the vampire really examine the damage had necessitated him getting rid of all of his mental shields and stopping his animagus's extreme reaction to anything getting inside his mind. It had taken two hours to manage that. Rahkesh had been slowly building his mental shields ever since he decided to come to Akren, removing them was something he'd never truly attempted before.

It wasn't that he didn't trust Namach, he did, more so than almost anyone else he knew, it was just that he had issues with people reading his mind. A state of affairs he could blame on Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore. And, partly, to having a real need for personal freedom and self-insured security. That came from a childhood with the Dursleys. Fortunately Namach had only examined the damage and the magic pathways that indicated changes, and had not (that Rahkesh could tell) read into his memories or thoughts.

Rahkesh had left the parselmouth children rescued from Voldemort's dungeons with Mr. Ramdas in India. Rahkesh had neither the time nor the ability, nor any desire to look after them, though he was making plans to visit, if he could. Mr. Ramdas was getting help from another parselmouths, particularly the son and heir of the Master of Paris, who had sent the Master of Vienna a blistering howler as soon as his creator told him of that vampire's attempt to get some intact parslemouths. Never mind that the Master of Paris's son (Julius) had been an intact parselmouth before being turned, in his case he had been ill with a life threatening disease. The youngsters Rahkesh had rescued seemed to be healthy, if very distrustful, ill with cold and exhaustion, and fearful. Rahkesh didn't quite trust the vampire around the young parselmouths, especially the ones whose healing abilities were actually intact, but Mr. Ramdas had been one of India's best duelers when he was younger and Rahkesh figured he could look after them. And he had learned from his own parselmagic that the instinct to use violence to protect young parselmouths was actually part of the magic – children could still have their abilities broken, whereas adults didn't have much to worry about there. Rahkesh had still been a bit uneasy about leaving so many young parselmouths in one place, but he'd had no choice.

Especially since Rahkesh had quickly realized that he had not recovered from leaving part of his soul in death. Namach's concerns about his leaving too much behind at once were proving true. Rahkesh had not been able to do mind magic of any sort since that fight. He had noticed instantly upon returning to Akren that he could not feel the telepathic currents in the air, and he had completely missed a mind magic signal from Alexia warning him to avoid the werewolf fight going on in the main hall.

In addition to his mind magic not working Rahkesh also hadn't been able to use any of his bloodmagics. As a rule he, and everyone who did bloodmagic, did not keep the magics fully functional at all times. That led to reliance on them and a weakening of other abilities. Having that happen could cause lethal problems if for some reason your bloodmagic was temporarily or permanently damaged, or if you were in a place where for any reason you couldn't use magic. Rahkesh had known that he had used his newest runes too much, too soon after creating them. He had expected them to need some repair work. He had even anticipated needing some time and healing magics to help the runes that he'd used in connection to those newest ones. What he had not expected was the seizure-inducing pain that had occurred when he tried to use one of his basic scent enhancing rituals to see if anyone had entered his rooms while he was gone.

Namach had apparently expected this, as the vampire had contacted Rahkesh minutes after he got back to Akren. Namach had just spent three hours examining how much of Rahkesh's soul was actually gone, how his connection to that piece across the life/death barrier worked, and how much flow back and forth was happening. Rahkesh had been in a deep meditative trance, and had actually fallen asleep for most of it.

"And it's going to keep hurting." Namach said, coming out of his own trance. "When you go all out Thunder, you _really_ go all out."

"How much of a soul do I have left?" Rahkesh asked.

"Plenty. Ordinarily necromancers do this in steps, leaving a little more behind each time, and bringing some back if they feel the need. You're not going to be doing any of that. Since you didn't have any of the necessary training you won't be able to bring any of that back, it's gone for good. The good news is that it wasn't a very large piece. Since it was an improperly created horcrux it was really a very small piece. The soul does regenerate when only a very small part is gone. At first what remains of your soul spreads to fill the gap, getting thinner everywhere – think of it like a skin-tight liquid-fabric around you. If the piece is too large, as most real horcruxes should be, then it won't regenerate. In this case you actually killed part of your soul, and it was a tiny part, your soul will rebuild. If the piece missing is too large it can't regenerate.

The reason necromancers typically do this only a little bit at a time is because when your soul is regenerating you're very vulnerable, the more you have to regenerate the longer it takes and the worse the weakness is in the time between. You've really pushed it, much more an you wouldn't be regenerating. Additionally you didn't remove it properly, which causes some additional complications, though nothing irreparable. You're going to be in a lot of pain for the next six weeks or more."

"When?"

"Probably only when doing deep level mind magic, necromancy, when exposed to any death magic of any sort, or when pushing yourself magically a little too far. You'll be doing bloodmagic again in a week…probably. If you can find the time to really work on the damage there. Most of your bloodmagic is badly damaged. Overloaded and uncontrolled"

Rahkesh rolled to sit upright. "I suppose that's not too bad." He said, reaching out to summon his glass of water from the table.

"Thunder don't-" Namach began.

Rahkesh collapsed with a gasp of pain. Fire shot through his right hand. Rahkesh, bent over and trying not to scream, gritted his teeth and waited, finally the pain stopped.

"Don't do magic." Namach finished. "Your soul might be okay but every magical channel in your body is a complete mess."

"My wand?" Rahkesh asked, voice shaking in reaction to cruciatus-like pain.

"I've seen people meld their wand with their flesh intentionally, and I've seen bits of broken wands get stuck inside people. I've never seen one completely disintegrate and get blasted into someone's hand." Namach said. "You might be doing bloodmagic soon, but nothing involving that hand. And I'm not sure if you _can_ do any magic at all right now."

Rahkesh looked over at him in horrified shock. Not be able to do magic?

"Magic is a whole-body thing Thunder. Currently you cannot have any magic in that hand." Namach explained. "The more magic you're doing the worse the pain will get until you collapse from it. From what just happened it clearly won't take much. You've absorbed the disintegrated remains of that wand, it's in your magical channels as well as your flesh. A human body, _any_ magical body, can't handle that kind of contamination. Oh maybe a vampire could, we're already dead. But we'd be crippled permanently. In your case if you can't get rid of it all it will eventually kill you."

"And how would I go about removing something that has disintegrated?" Rahkesh asked. Actual battles he could handle, this was a different kind of threat, and far more terrifying, to Rahkesh, than even an army of demons.

"Good question." Namach said.

"This _can _be fixed right?" Rahkesh said, not noticing the hint of fear in his voice.

"Of course. Well I assume so. I haven't heard of a human removing something that disintegrated and got inside their magic. Merlin once absorbed a magical poison through his skin and had an awful time removing the last of it from his magic. I still have his report on that somewhere." Namach said, "and another by him on poisoned enchanted dust that a person can inhale and which then gets into every organ in the body via the bloodstream. It then goes straight into a person's magic. That may be what you need to study, it's a formerly solid substance converted into pure magic and contaminates a persons' own magic. Scary stuff, you can work the enchantments to take over the person's mind so that during the month or so it takes to die they're completely under your control. It has been removed, at least once, but never when concentrated in a certain part of body." Namach said, nodding to Rahkesh's scarred hand.

"That's the only case in a human?" Rahkesh asked.

"The fae have used this as a weapon in war with each other for a long time, so have the goblins. Get something deadly and magical, convert to just magic, and inject. The Vashora specialize with it – since they are the kings of biological warfare it makes some sense, it can only be done with stuff that was once alive. The Vashora can actually produce spore-like things to do it with. I think you ought to be able to remove this without too much difficulty. Your magic will be rejecting the foreign substance anyway, the only reason that it might be hard to figure out is that no one's needed to do it before. It certainly is not a common injury; after more than three thousand years I would still not run out of fingers trying to count how many times I've seen anything remotely like this."

"And since my wand was made of a magical creature it was really easy for it to get in."

"Hmm. A phoenix feather correct?"

"Yes."

Namach paused to think that over. Rahkesh, fighting his panic and trying to ignore the cold sweat on his body, waited patiently, turning his hand over to examine it. The splintery lightning-like scars wrapped all over it, though mostly on the palm. The scars really did look like wicked fiery lightning. They were still new and hurt to touch. They were also raised a bit and made it hard to make a fist. He'd have to soak the hand in some healing potions to keep the scar tissue from becoming a real problem. But at the moment he couldn't even wash the hand – anything rubbing on the raised scars hurt.

"Leave the phoenix feather for now." Namach finally said. "Lets concentrate on getting the disintegrated wood out."

"Why?"

"Phoenixes are magical, you also were on good terms with that phoenix were you not?"

"Yes." Rahkesh said, not asking how Namach had possibly guessed that. "It used its tears to heal me once."

"Then definitely leave the magics from the feather. I doubt that's what's causing your troubles. In time that might be very beneficial, to have something from a phoenix inside your magic." Namach said, "once the magic from the wood is out we'll take another look and see if the phoenix-magic is beneficial enough to override any problems it causes. Right now the effects are too mixed. The wood itself is basically nonmagical, and it will kill you. The phoenix is magical, it liked you, and they're very strongly tied to healing, revival, and life, not death. One lethal reaction, and one that may not have any reaction. But I doubt that will be the case. You'll have some reaction to the phoenix feather contaminating your magic, it's just going to be a question of whether or not any benefit, if there is one, outweighs the bad reaction. There will definitely be one of those. I'll find that journal and see if there's anything useful in there."

"All right. Ah…are any of the vampires around here particularly annoyed with me?" Rahkesh asked.

"For attacking a City Master? Absolutely." Namach replied. "Pierre and I had a little telepathic chat." Namach said, Rahkesh frowned, not knowing that name. "The Master of Vienna? The one you got into a little duel with?" Namach added, grinning.

"I imagine he's a bit upset." Rahkesh said.

"Not as much as I had expected." Namach admitted, "banned you from Vienna and said he'd kill you if you ever set foot in his city, but that's to be expected. His vampires have an official notice, but he couldn't be bothered to send you one. He contacted me to warn me about what happened to you when your wand blew up."

"What?" Rahkesh said, "why would he do that?"

"Because he's smart." Namach replied. "You are, of course, aware he deliberately didn't use much offensive magic in that duel?"

"Yes." Rahkesh said, "maybe five different curses total and a firespell." It had been more than a little odd. As a City Master Rahkesh had expected more from him.

"That hand of yours is his reason for not attacking. He contacted me because he wanted me to warn the students at Akren to not attack you until the magical fluctuations stop. He wasn't about to kill you – too much trouble for him, you know that right?"

"Yes, I had guessed he couldn't really kill me, not with all those fae right there." Rahkesh said, those fae would have attacked the vampire in a heartbeat. As far as they knew Rahkesh had just gone into a battle to save fae, Akren fae to be sure, but fae nonetheless. And the Master of Vienna was _not_ Akren-trained.

"Well he also didn't put up much of a fight. Now that's fairly typical Pierre. His strongest point is his healing abilities. You could sit there and hack his head off repeatedly and it would just pop right back on in seconds. He could keep that up for days. He'll recover from almost anything very quickly. That's how he got to his place. Simply wore down the former Master of Vienna. Pierre doesn't duel in the traditional way either, he uses enchantments. He's very good at it. Between that and his healing skills he can outlast most any opponent, unless you can find a way around all his healing and outdo his enchantments. I've done it, brute strength won't get far. And he's won many a tough duel with just enchantments and few dueling spells.

However he couldn't use any of those enchantments on you. You're magic is such a mess they'd probably come apart and blow up. Similarly with you being a basilisk, but still channeling the thunderbird, and with some weird blood chemistry from the reaction to the wand you were far enough off that it wasn't safe to use any potions against you. So when you attacked he just decided he'd really rather not fight it out. He kills you accidentally, he's in trouble. Smart vampire. There's not many of us who can tell when the best option is to _not_ attack. Pierre's one of the few who will walk away from a fight he doesn't care to be bothered with. Had you been healthy he probably would have turned that into a real fight, and, know this Thunder, I suspect he would have won." Namach said.

Rahkesh didn't respond, but to himself he thought that he'd had a pretty good chance against the vampire. This was especially true since he always factored in his willingness to die when he thought about a fight. The parselmagic had allowed for that to be a perfectly acceptable conclusion to the battle. If he could take out the vampire then the other six parselmouths would have been reasonably safe – no one would have touched them because the world's other few parselmouths would probably have stepped in.

"However in this case he wasn't going to kill you, or risk killing you accidentally, and he was unsure he could subdue you without accidentally killing you. So he just defended himself and fought back when he sensed it would make you pause. He doesn't use his bloodmagics in battle much, that's his backup plan. Anyhow, he's none too pleased about being attacked, and he's furious about missing the chance to get some parselmouth followers, but no, he won't be coming after you." Namach finished.

"Well I guess that's something." Rahkesh said. And he was more or less crippled. He'd have rather have the vampire coming after him.

"How's it feel to have him gone?" Namach asked. Not having to say who this "him" was.

"Bloody amazing." Rahkesh sighed, grinning. "And I've put my other self to rest, more or less. I'll send a letter to the paper back there, explaining what happened, that we needed parseltongues to remove the wards, the third basilisk was invited as a courtesy gesture since it's partly his territory, and he and Voldemort got into a fight, and I couldn't _not _defend another parseltongue. Voldemort may have been one of us but he'd completely lost any chance he had with us when he imprisoned parselmouth children and caused such problems. So we all fought and then the third basilisk killed him. So now there're two basilisks. And he wanted to stay away from the media and go back to his self-imposed exile, and I agreed. He's spending his time working on another book, more or less a recluse now, and staying very much in the muggle world. When the demons invade I'll kill off that identity entirely."

"What about your changing magic?" Namach asked.

"One of these days I will find out how you know these things."

"I smelled it. And given what I smell you won't be able to replicate the magical signature for long."

"I thought of that. I_ g_rabbed a copy of the magic while I was sending my soul across. So it feels like him dying. That should fool anyone. Then maybe I can have the demons destroy the location." Rahkesh said. He tried to think ahead. The flash in Namach's eyes told him that his move had impressed the clever ancient vampire. It wasn't often someone managed that.

"Very well. We'll be starting work on the bloodmagic projects tomorrow. Lessons for a day, then a review of the wards to make sure they're all there. You can just keep records rather than doing any magic. After that we'll start on other things and see how well you manage."

"I suspect the vampire students here will want revenge." Rahkesh said.

"Possibly. We don't have anyone from Austria at the moment, and only three among the alumni, but there's always someone who feels insulted or threatened by humans standing up to vampires." Namach said. "Mind you, a lot of those same then go and complain at other times about a lack of feisty prey."

"And I can't do magic." Rahkesh sighed.

"Well you can't do _spells_." Namach corrected. "Lets go through some wandless stuff that isn't just a spell done wandlessly, and see if that is different."

"Why would that be?" Rahkesh asked, not following Namach's reasoning.

"Because your magical channels are designed for spells, well, not _designed_, more like trained. Even most wandless stuff serves the same exact purpose as some wand-spell, in the same way, just without the wand to focus. Wandless magic that _isn't_ like spell magic uses your magic differently. If you were holding a wand and doing a spell that you normally use a wand for when this happened, you might be able to do magic that _isn't _at all wand-magic-like with minimal pain."

Namach was correct. Two hours later Rahkesh had found the limits of the damage. He could not do most actual spells. To levitate something he had to move the air and make it move that way. But he could still get the same effects; it just took some real creativity and careful wandless magic. Not too surprisingly Namach had all sorts of clever ideas of how one could reach a desired effect in a fairly roundabout manner. Having three thousands years worth of accumulated knowledge and practice definitely helped.

Rahkesh was a bit above average, for an Akren student, with his wandless magic (meaning that he was way beyond what most anyone not affiliated with the Academy could do). And so he could manage to do most things he might want to accomplish using creative wandless magic. In addition they discovered that he could still use enchanted weapons just fine. Namach theorized that this was because they served as the focus and drew magic from his entire body, causing no real surges anywhere and if he really tried he could make sure that they didn't draw from his hand.

Unfortunately not even the most roundabout methods were entirely pain free. In the end it came down to how much pain Rahkesh could handle. Even wandless magic that did things no spell had ever done still caused sharp spikes of pain, or a dull throbbing.

"I don't suppose you'd let some of the Professors examine you?" Namach asked. "This is such an unusual case. Or maybe use you as an example in some of the medical classes taught outside the school." He was referring to the ones either only alumni could attend, or the ones open to the public. Akren offered both continued schooling in anything alumni wanted to learn, and classes to the public. The later were no where near as rigorous as the ones for those trained at Akren, and didn't cover absolutely everything – best to keep some secrets for just those from the Academy. These classes were also taught in a manner consistent with all other normal magical schools – teachers didn't burn you alive for interrupting or coming in late. The publicly offered classes were Akren's only real attempt at any Public Relations. They didn't care enough to try anything else. However many centuries earlier the AAA had agreed that since they were the premier magical academy they should offer something, just to try to keep in touch with those unsuited to Akren's structure.

"Not any classes offered to the public." Rahkesh said. "I'll think about the ones for alumni. And while I don't mind having the Healing Professors take a look at this I'd rather not have any of the classes involved."

"I'll let them know. This _is_ an unprecedented medical issue. Some of them might have better ideas for fixing it. All I can tell you is not to use bloodmagic just yet, and that your normal magical channels and bloodmagic are interacting in a quasi-self-destructive way. The threat to your life is not immediate, a matter of months probably. It ought to be fixable, it will take some doing."

Rahkesh nodded. He was exhausted, the fight with Voldemort, followed by his brief fight with the Master of Vienna, had taken a lot out of him.

"Go meditate some, repair your mind, and then do some work on your bloodmagic. It needs a little help." Namach said.

Rahkesh wanted to discuss the real magics that had happened during that battle. Specifically the ones that _hadn't_ happened. Sure, that knife he'd made – it was a good idea to bring it along, but not life saving. What had not happened as expected? Or had Namach actually expected anything? Whatever it was that Namach had been so concerned over hadn't happened. And yet Namach was no longer worried. Rahkesh was confused and wanted answers. But he was also starting to wonder. Several times now he had asked what was going on, and each time Namach had given no real answer. Rahkesh was starting wonder if perhaps Namach was saying nothing to avoid making things worse. In which case Rahkesh was on his own. It wasn't an idea he liked; the thought that Namach was refusing to tell him what he suspected was happening because he knew that if he told Rahkesh, Rahkesh would either act differently, or not act, in such a way as to make the problem worse. The implication; that something was going to happen but it would go better if Rahkesh wasn't expecting it, was not comforting.

Namach had already risen and was at his desk opening a letter, probably from one of the vampire leaders. Rahkesh rose and left without saying anything.

Namach looked up from his letter as his familiar let him know, by way of a pleased hiss, that Rahkesh had left.

"Wonder what it's going to take?" The vampire mused to the giant lizard. "If anything could force him to do it I would have thought a threat to other parselmouths would be the surest thing. For such a transformation, what could possibly mean more to him and both his animal forms than that?"

Eli rolled his eyes and shook his frill around in exasperation.

"I suspect you'll find you like him more once he does finally do it." Namach warned. "And you need to start training to deal with these demons. They'd just _love_ to have you around as a pet."

Eli's shriek/hiss made his friend wince. The lizard extended his frill, white magic crackled over his scales and lashed off the end of his tail. Any demon thinking of making _him_ a pet was worse than dead.

"Yes, I know, you have an attitude." The vampire muttered.

Eli turned his back and went to go bask in the sun.

XXX

"So what will you do?" Neville asked. They were sitting on the patio of Potter Manor, the main one. Harry had invited all of his friends around for dinner. Charlie Weasely was currently entranced with a row of dragon paintings on the walls, explaining to Bill, Cho, and Dean what they were. Fred and George had vanished for half the evening, Harry knew they had been upstairs leaving pranks, but now they were sitting at a large oval table with Hermione, Ginny, Remus, Mr. Weasely, and Sheamus. The others were off around the gardens.

"I'm writing another book." Harry said. "Slowly, I'm planning a few trips to different parts of the world. Then I need to sit down and write."

"What is it about?" Ginny asked.

"Salazar Slytherin." Harry replied, shocking everyone. "More specifically about his attempt to make the parselmagic healing gift hereditary. He wanted there to be more of us, and he did manage it, but at a terrible price. Voldemort was the last of that line. I'm going to write about Salazar's experiment, and what the fallout was."

"Voldemort." Dean said, turning to look at Harry.

"No. All of those who underwent the potions/bloodmagic ritual did indeed wind up with the entirety of the parselmagic abilities. They just also went violently insane. In many cases it was hard to determine that they _were_ insane, because they acted so naturally. Salazar wound up having to hunt them down and kill them. That's where it gets truly tragic, most of them were his children. The form of insanity they all seemed to get was somewhat along the lines of a Napoleonic complex. Eventually they killed him. As he was dying Salazar left his memories in the parselmagic. I discovered them a few hours after killing Voldemort. I was in a trance healing myself and those memories just showed up." Harry said. He'd gone through them while Namach had worked on evaluating him. Perhaps one day he'd write that book. But he had much better things to be doing. However, it was a good task to set his much-disliked alter ego to doing.

"I don't suppose we're allowed to speak to anyone about that?" Hermione asked acidly. She had still not forgiven him for the bloodmagic secrecy enchantment he'd used on them without their permission. Harry didn't care. He'd told all of them, the others had agreed readily.

"Sure. That spell just keeps you from accidentally telling anyone anything I need to keep a secret. Since I have every intention of letting the papers know what I'm up to – they won't let me alone until I do – then go right ahead."

"And how are things at Akren?"

"Exhausting. We're training nonstop to fight the demons." Harry said. If any of them had guessed that he and Rahkesh were one and the same, and really he didn't see how they couldn't have, they had said nothing. Perhaps they were catching on. Of course, once Harry Potter was disposed of, he'd have to come up with other reasons for seeing all his old friends. But that could wait until he knew how many were left. With Akren's training schedule speeding up this might be the last time he saw some of them. Which was why he was here with them, taking the evening off instead of training more. It seemed all too likely that not all of them would get into one of the secure bunkers, and so unless they found some way to stop the demons from coming at all many of those with him would be dead soon.

"All of the cursebreakers are being consulted on anything we might know for building better wards." Charlie said, taking an empty seat. "For the hideouts."

"Has there been a decision on how to select people?" Harry asked.

"No." Mr. Weasely answered. "Just a lot of good proposals, and lists of things that have to be considered."

"Such as?" Hermione asked curiously.

"Should we be selecting based on age at all? Are people who live on medications going to be able to survive if we lose the ability to produce those medications, and if not, why should we bring them in at all? Should we allow pregnant women in, even though they'll soon be adding to the number in the hideout? Should we take fewer than the shelter can hold and plan on reproducing? What about people with communicable diseases? What about squibs, do we save them, will the demons even notice them and try to take them? By all accounts they're only interested in the fully magical, and according to our ally, the vampire/demon Sharahak, squibs are killed as infants in the demon realm. So they're probably safe joining the muggles. There's so much to think about. The people in charge of planning supplies are going nuts. In some places they're planning to grow a lot of food in the shelter, but that means less space for people, even if the shelter will then possibly be self-sustaining. Other places are planning to have shelters that only last for a decade, and save more at the expense of having to hope that something changes before supplies run out." Mr. Weasely explained.

"I'm helping." Neville said quietly, "there's a team of herbologists selecting the best plants to grow and how the grow them in the least space. We're working in one of the self-sustaining shelters."

"How many will that one hold?" Bill asked.

"Two thousand, but there will be more than one of them." Neville said.

"The major news papers are carrying a countdown to the day when the demons can get through." Ginny told Harry, "everyone's really anxious."

"Of course. Though perhaps it needs to be explained that while the elves told us we had three months, they did say that the demons might not attack at once, or they might manage to push the spells and get through a few days earlier, but only a few days." Harry said.

He said nothing to them of his recent magical troubles. It wasn't the sort of thing he would ever talk to them about again. Harry confided little in his old friends, less and less even with the bloodmagic to keep him safe. Most of his life was unknown to them, and he liked it that way. He hadn't left so completely for nothing, really he sometimes wondered why he kept any contact with them at all. But they were people, real people who somewhat still cared about him, and he them. And they were a good source of information, though Harry rarely acknowledged that as a reason for meeting with them even in his own thoughts. That and they might be useful contacts some day. It was easier now, that the new state of things between him and his old acquaintances had stabilized.

He had his freedom, no one and nothing to tie him down or demand anything of him. There was no one wanting answers, no asking questions, no one telling him not to do anything, no one else's ideas of right and wrong, only himself. There was Akren, and that only lasted until he had graduated. Akren placed many restrictions on its students, but in return graduates gained a level of freedom in the world that could be gained no other way, aside from a completely criminal existence. The only thing they had to do was vote at occasional AAA meetings, and for the mandatory ones occasional didn't even mean once a year. In return he would be able to ignore most laws of any country, get the world's best safe houses and libraries, access to an alumni network that might (though they didn't have to help each other) serve his purposes, whatever they were, and he would have the best training available. And an assured place in the world's best shelter when the demons struck.

Rahkesh wondered if Neville's work would allow him a chance at survival. Harry felt a little sad at the thought that most of his first friends would be dead within seven weeks. Rahkesh had more important things to think of. If they died, they died, he had a war to fight for the whole species. Harry thought it was sorry indeed if someone as smart as Hermione, or as skilled as Bill and Charlie and the twins, died. Rahkesh was being coldly logical when he put them and Neville on a list of those who would be useful if they lived, Harry was a little sentimental about wondering if there was any training he could give them to help them fight when the time came. Rahkesh dismissed that idea out of hand, and mentioned gently that they were welcome to let their friends know that Harry Potter was now a recluse living alone and not caring about the demons at all, and therefore unprepared. Harry was concerned about how he would keep in contact with however few survived if he was "dead", Rahkesh felt a small relaxation and reassurance in the knowledge that there would be even fewer who knew anything about his past. As in everything weak and incompetent Harry Potter quietly died without argument, and the cunning, clever, powerful, ruthless, highly intelligent and very well educated Rahkesh Asmodaeus took off without looking back.

XXX

Spinning in mid air the dark blue orb gave off a soft silvery glow, tinting the pale marble walls a cold blue. The hall was circular, vast enough to hold an entire cavalry regiment. White marble pillars supported a domed ceiling coated in blood red crystals.

Scrawled across the massive solid marble floor were runes and designs, drawn in blood. Blood runes wounds up the walls, around the pillars, and linked to the ceiling of red crystals. Blood runes circled the walls, which had no doors or windows. Just off center of the middle of the hall the runes grew tighter, more complex, and more intricate. Building inwards in a circle, spiraling tighter, drawing in all the branches and connections from the ceiling, the walls, and floor.

At the center of the knot a tall vampire stood. He was naked, and where he ought to have had skin he was instead covered in glowing gold and red. Layers upon layers upon layers of bloodmagic runes, accumulating over thousands of years they covered his entire body, head to toe, replacing his skin. Normally they functioned as skin, but now they were alive. Light pulsed around him, sparkling gold flew around his body in swirls and rune sets flickered to life, then lay still.

The blue orb began to turn light blue, sparks flashing off it like little blue thunderbolts, to be absorbed by the runes. In response fire exploded out of the vampire's body, running through his blood and washing to the floor in waves. Slowly flaming tendrils began to leap off of specific blood runes, connecting to the walls and ceiling until the vampire stood at the center of a massive web of fire and glowing flaming blood.

White magic flashed, the blue orb exploded. Light blasted through the hall. The fire snapped inwards, catching the light and wrapping around it, drawing in back in. From the ceiling the blood red crystals flashed with white fire. A similar white fire leaped through the runes across the vampire's body and flew across the blood runes on the floor and walls, wrapping around the pillars and reconnecting to the ceiling.

The light crashed inwards, turning black it shrank into a solid mass, small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. The vampire opened his eyes for the first time, and caught the small black mass as it fell from the air. It landed solidly in his hand. Glowing silver eyes flicked over it, turning it around, and images flashed across the dark surface.

As the white fire faded and the red crystals stopped glowing the vampire chuckled softly. Challenges were _so_ nice. Defeating them was just thrilling. And these days he had far too few.

In another part of the vast fortress Sharahak, sleeping in his rooms atop a wide soft bed, woke and stretched his wings as his Lord's call swept over his mind. Finally they would have some information and the battle planning could begin in earnest. Sharahak settled in a demon's naturally four-legged gait and loped out of the room towards the study.

Outside the solid hall, surrounding a ring of solid gold set into the floor, the only real entrance to the hall, twenty guards shifted as their master's magic flowed across their bodies and through their minds. Ten of them blinked hard as orders slipped into their minds. Instantly five stepped out of their positions and vanished in tiny blinks of magic. Five others broke formation and headed for the other wing of the fortress, their master was calling a Gathering, and the hall needed to be prepared.

XXX

"If I look that good when I'm your age, it'll be a miracle." Rahkesh said, following Remus into the werewolf's new house. Remus, having moved to Spain, had undergone an amazing transformation. Healthier, fitter, cleaner, and happier than Rahkesh had ever seen him.

Remus laughed at his compliment, "I like it here. And it is good to have a pack again. I had not truly realized just how much the stress gets to you long term, being alone."

"Lycanthropy, the only social virus." Rahkesh chuckled, noting that Remus actually smiled. Joking about being a werewolf, Remus really was doing much better. Taking off his coat he had to be careful with his damaged hand. He had thought it healed, but pressure on the skin produced fire-like sensations. Remus noted his attempt at hiding a grimace.

"How bad is it?"

"Bad enough." Rahkesh admitted, having told Remus a little of it when questioned about the scars on the way over. "Apart from the wand disintegrating and then getting blasted _into_ my magical channels the splintering wand itself tore most of the tendons in my hand and snapped a few bones."

"Your healing classes must have been good." Remus said, eyeing the splintery lightning-like scars.

"I had good teachers." Rahkesh said, "and it's amazing what you can do when your life depends on it."

"A situation you are far too familiar with." Remus said. Rahkesh detected the sad note in his voice that accompanied the visible scowl. No matter how old or how experienced Rahkesh got Remus would never stop being a family friend looking out for his best friend's son. Rahkesh appreciated it as much as it irritated him. Fortunately Remus never pried too much or tried to tell him not to do dangerous things, Rahkesh appreciated that even more.

"And which we'll all be getting more familiar with." Rahkesh said softly, switching the topic as he sat on the couch. Remus had a small fire going in the old brick and stone fireplace, with rain beating against the windows the fire felt very good. "Have the werewolves decided anything?"

"We voted on some things." Remus said. "No one who has committed certain crimes will be allowed into any of the shelters. And no one who has easily contagious lethal diseases, stuff like that. It's hard, I think the rest will come down to making a list, giving everyone a number, and then using a random number generator."

"Fair enough." Rahkesh said.

"Those who are critical to repairing or maintaining the shelter's will be placed automatically, the jobs will be divided up among the species in each shelter, but truly critical people are already being very carefully chosen." Remus pulled a golden chain out of his shirt, dangling from it were two things, one vial of luck potion, given to him by Rahkesh, and a red disk.

"The disk is a very fast acting poison." Remus explained, "I just bite it." He tapped his shoe, his watch, and then rolled up a sleeve to reveal a tiny capsule imbedded just under the skin, "backups, just in case."

Rahkesh tried not to grimace, though he felt ill, seeing his old friend having to contemplate suicide.

"I don't suppose large quantities of luck potion will do anyone much good?" Remus asked lightly.

"No. The dosages don't last so long, and it takes a long time to make, and you need just the right ingredients. Which don't come from the same continent and half of which cannot be transported magically." Rahkesh said. "If the sea demons interrupt shipping it'll cause the most problems for potions suppliers.

"Can they do that?"

"The sea demons are already here." Rahkesh said, that news would be in the papers the next morning, courtesy of the fae, who were getting desperate in their search for the missing sirens. "They've probably taken or killed the sirens, and the merefolk have been bringing in odd reports."

Remus rubbed tiredly at his eyes. "It is strange to think back on life with just Voldemort…and finding it preferable."

Rahkesh gave half-hearted chuckle. "Yeah, I'd trade the demons for him any day."

"What happened to those children?" Remus asked, Rahkesh made no effort to contain the news of what had been found in Voldemort's base.

"They're safe in India." Rahkesh said, settling back into the couch. "I just don't understand it. Parselmouths are rare, very rare. There are just too few capable of containing the magics. The healing gift was placed into magic, not originally part of anything. It isn't that there's a limit to how many there can be at a time, but there're so few people born capable of receiving such a magical gift."

"So how did Voldemort get six, of about the same age?"

"That's just the problem. It should never have happened. Voldemort, then me, a generation apart. Then I learned of another, a little boy, then these six. Voldemort isn't naturally occurring – he's the last of an experiment done by Salazar Slytherin. I originally thought I got my parselmagic from Voldemort, but I didn't, I _am_ a real parselmouth. But I can't tell anything about these children. I haven't had the time to try, and with my newest…difficulties…with magic, I may not get a chance. I can't find anything in the parselmagic about how many parseltounges are usually around at any one time. There was a guy many centuries ago who worked out dates of birth and such for a score or so of parseltounges. He couldn't find any decade with more than two being born in it."

"So we have an extreme anomaly."

"Yeah. And no explanation."

"You could try to…uh…_ask_…Voldemort's soul." Remus suggested uneasily.

"I am advancing unusually fast in my studies, but I'm no where near that yet."

"Could another necromancer?"

"Yes, but I'd rather they not. I couldn't stop them, but they probably won't on their own. Necromancers don't play around with death just for the fun of it. I'd be worried that he might have figured out what really happened. Not that I think any necromancer would go running to the press with my story, but the fewer who know the better."

"Seems like a lot of people must know." Remus pointed out.

"Yes. But most are from Akren. Akren used to operate by just training its students, then letting them go to do whatever they wanted. You only had to vote at the occasional mandatory meetings or elections. Once every two or three years. The AAA is pulling everyone together now in preparation for this war. Even the assassin alumni aren't taking contracts on each other anymore. And the students, well we still fight a lot, but no one's been killed recently, and the group battle training is having an effect. No one from Akren will go blabbing anywhere about the secrets of another one of us, not now." _And not about me_ Rahkesh thought, no, if what Daray and Haedil had told him that was unlikely. "And the others who know…well the fae Council probably knows, but they're not going to cause me any trouble right now. The Ateres vampire family are friends, the Vashora fae…they're just the Vashora…and for some reason I don't worry about them saying anything at the wrong time." Rahkesh explained. Though there was no explaining the Vashora. Even Namach didn't quite get what they were all about.

XXX

"Does this look lopsided?" Daray asked, turning so that the floating red orb in front of him faced Rahkesh. "It feels off-balance." The vampire fretted at the perfect-looking orb. "I don't know…it isn't quite right. And it's a little darker red than I'd like." The orb was the exact same shade of red as every other one in the room.

They were making Life Crystals. Namach had kept them in lecture for seven hours the previous day working through every aspect of it, even though they were only doing the first stage today. The clever old vampire did indeed have his own special variation on how to make them. His method was immeasurably more efficient and also produced Life Crystals capable of holding more, lasting longer, and not breaking as easy. The basic premise Namach had worked from was that the reason that Life Crystals were usually round was because a persons' raw magic and soul were continuous, therefore edges would be brittle and misdirect the magic. Namach had done away with that rule, which had been the very foundation of a Life Crystal. The Life Crystals they were creating had a perfectly round base, then grew outwards in a true crystalline structure, complete with jagged edges and corners. They grew almost at random, with some correlation to the psychological state of the individual using them. Namach's new design worked amazingly well, but it had to have an absolutely perfect base. The less-round the starting base the more the rest of it lost those qualities that made these Life Crystals preferable. Quite possibly the reason no one had come up with something similar was that no one had Namach's intensity when working with bloodmagic, nor the time in their lives to attempt the experiments he had. He'd cheerfully told them that start to finish his redesign of Life Crystals had taken "only eighty years, working a few hours a day".

Fortunately his redesigned Life Crystals started out liquid, and liquid, when spun just right in the exact right place with no imperfections, created a perfectly round ball. So getting that ought not to have been too hard. But as the bloodmagic students had discovered this was not so; getting everything perfect meant that it had to be done in a place with equal gravity everywhere. Normal earth conditions didn't work. They couldn't touch the liquid, but they had to keep it spinning very fast. Perfectly equal gravity from absolutely every direction was also necessary, and the there was no set spell for gravity. At the same time magic directed _onto _the liquid destroyed it. So it had to be done wandless.

The liquid then had to solidify, a process involving an actual bloodmagic ritual where the creator had to alter the magic of the liquid so that the physical and chemical properties allowed it to solidify. That would be done the next day.

And they hadn't even gotten to what had to be done when activating them and adding someone's life magic to the starting base.

His recent disability had actually put Rahkesh ahead of his classmates here. It had been only four days since Voldemort's death, and their inspections of the existing wards had taken far longer than planned. Classes of students long past had been very clever indeed and the thousands of unique little tricks, traps, backup systems, corrections, and strengthening layers had been more than anyone had anticipated. For four days Rahkesh had spent dawn to dusk working with his classmates, and then most of the night practicing wandless magic. Rather than struggling to learn new things, he had instead relearned the old, making sure that he did everything in ways that did not direct magic in any way related to the way wand magic did. It was inefficient, tiring, and painful, but it did work. He'd made sure to keep his recent problems a secret, and used wandless magic to make himself appear to be doing normal magic. Any vampires interested in getting a little revenge on behalf of their injured City Master were waiting and Rahkesh had not yet been bothered. He hoped he had enough of a reputation as a fighter that no one would try anything. And the recent strengthen of the usual bonds between Akren students might calm most of those who might have acted – the Master of Vienna had failed to get into Akren as a young vampire.

"Looks fine," Rahkesh judged. He and Daray constantly discussed bloodmagic, what they were working on, little curious details, or what alterations to the basic procedures they had had to make, but because bloodmagic was so individualized they had never worked so closely together as they were now.

Rahkesh had learned quickly that while he had known Daray was extremely dedicated, and capable of spending hours on any one portion of his next ritual, he had not truly appreciated just what sort of perfectionist Daray really was. The quintessential vampire, the absolute stereotype, was insanely perfectionist about his bloodmagic.

It was a bit of a contradiction, Daray's usual personality, and his bloodmagic. Daray was a wild ruthless fighter from a family of mercenary enigmas. He had either fought, fucked, killed, or done all three to the majority of the students currently at Akren, half the time he was irreverent to the point of driving Namach to take him apart almost every other month, while being irritatingly obsequious the rest of the time. He decorated his rooms with paintings in which the paints contained blood, with whips that he also used as sex toys, and stuffed animals on the windowsills. He enjoyed the smell of fresh death, he liked to go the most frenzied of muggle night clubs to join the crowds and hunt, and he thrived on the very idea of warfare and chaos, yet when doing bloodmagic he was so calm and focused that he didn't breathe (not that he needed to, but most young vampires did, out of habit) or notice anything else happening around him. With his bloodmagic he was the most insane sort of perfectionist Rahkesh had ever met.

Daray's perfectionism made his Professor Snape look sloppy. Daray had thrown out all of another student's' Life Crystals when he noticed flecks of dust on the outer surface, even though that would not have impaired their use. He had cleaned the mixing cauldrons with a scourging charm intense enough to actually destroy one. He had completely flipped at the idea that the ceilings of the rooms they were working in hadn't been dusted, he measured the liquids they were working with to a hundredth of a millimeter or to the centigram (the only needed accuracy was to the millimeter or gram, depending on the ingredient and property being measured), he had complained for an hour when the equipment they had been given didn't measure quite as exactly as he preferred and had brought in his own, and he had rejected the seven Life Crystals he himself had made as being unfit, even though Namach judged them to be remarkably good work and perfectly useable, though not nearly as good as the ones Namach had shown them as examples.

In short Daray was driving everyone just a little crazy.

"Daray," Rahkesh began when Daray, for the third time, weighed the Crystal, "it's fine."

"But-"

"The _weight_ hardly matters as long as it has the correct density for its size." Namach, standing directly behind Daray, growled. Dressed like a King and wearing flashing bloodmetal armbands, earrings, necklace, belt, pin, shoulder insignia, armored wrist guards, and with bloodmetal worked into his boots the vampire Lord was more than a little intimidating. Rahkesh assumed he was meeting with either high ranking vampires, the elves, the whole Conclave, or the demons; Namach didn't bother with anything like that for his students.

"But I wanted it a certain size."

"It is a certain size." Namach pointed out, stating the blatantly obvious just to irritate Daray. "It is the size it is, _that_ is a certain size." Daray glared, exasperated. Namach was thoroughly annoyed at Daray and was deliberately baiting him.

"But not the size it's supposed to be."

"Is it useable?"

"Yes."

"Then why destroy it and make another?"

"Because it's not the size I intended it to be."

"Make another if you don't like, but you'll not be destroying that one. It's your best yet and perfectly useable, you're only going to be using one of these, the rest go to the general supply." Namach said with some acidity. He had been most displeased when Daray had destroyed the other ones as not being _quite_ perfect, even though they had been good enough to be completely functional. "The goal is to produce as many as possible." Namach said sternly when Daray began to protest. "Perfectionism is an acceptable goal, destroying useable projects along the way because they're not quite what _you_ wanted is just dumb. You can't reuse the materials so you might as well keep it." With that the ancient vampire slid away from them, cloak rippling in and out of the shadows, certain that Daray would, for once, obey. Daray was in one of his more rebellious phases, having fought, soundly defeated, and drunk the blood of a vampire student in his last year of schooling just two days before. Soon enough, probably within another week (by Rahkesh's estimate) Namach would decide that he and Daray needed to have another of their little "talks". In the bizarre inconceivable way of vampires Rahkesh suspected Daray would by then be looking forward to it.

"What's got Professor Namach all snippy? Aside from Daray's bitching about creatively imagined imperfections in his work?" Haedil asked softly from across the table. Between him and Rahkesh was a pile of sixteen Life Crystals they had made. It was strenuous work to create the base of the Life Crystals, but the most time consuming part was the next step.

Daray, focused again on his Crystal, didn't hear Haedil's remark. Which was probably for the best, given that Rahkesh was sitting on the diagonal between them and therefore likely in the crossfire zone.

"Disagreement over how to select which vampires get to continue existing and which will have to kill themselves before the demons arrive." Nathaniel (Dan), a vampire two years older and one class ahead said.

"What's the plan?" Rahkesh asked curiously, it was probably a near opposite to anything anyone else was considering; vampires didn't seem to believe in equal rights, whatever their selection process was, it probably would have caused another world war had it been tried with anyone else.

"We're worried about leaving any muggle vampires around to cause trouble, the demons don't have any in their realm and we're not sure what will happen. If the demons don't take them they'll cause all sorts of trouble and muggles will quickly find out about them." Daray explained. "So we're going to kill them all. It's the only real solution. Most muggle vampires were turned as teenagers, rebelling see? And they don't usually live past their first encounter with a magical vampire, their blood is too good and healthier that muggle blood, though often not so good as a magical human. It's unfortunate, there're some really brilliant muggle vampires, but we can't save any because they have to kill every night. The only way out would be to give them the blood of a magical vampire. Then they would soon be able to stop killing and only drink enough blood to live. But they'd still be taking the places of magical vampires, and even with magical blood they would take millennia to develop the ability to use magic. So they all have to go. Naturally they're not going quietly."

"Of course not." Haedil said.

"Lord Hadrian is going through his territory with all of his forces, killing every last muggle vampire. Lord Konovalov and his lieutenants have almost finished, they got rid of most of them last year. The Japanese, however, are having a terrible time. All their muggle vampires fled to China – easier to hide there than on the islands – and the Chinese Lords are seriously pissed off. Namach got back at dawn from calming everyone."

"Then you have territorial problems," a vampire in their class called Andre said, leaning over. Andre, a tall thin vampire with blond hair to her shoulders was a year older than any of them, and suffered from coming from a bloodline not at all known for its bloodmagics. That she'd made it so far was rather amazing, even if the knives she used sometimes shattered a combination of Namach's excellent training and skill, coupled with some sort of natural talent on her part, had kept her alive. Still, this was her last bloodmagic class, she would probably not meet the requirements to continue in bloodmagic, and certainly not in necromancy. As it was their class wasn't part of the bloodmagic curriculum, Andre was in it because she couldn't manage the one that was the next step in that.

"How would that be a problem?" Rahkesh asked.

"There's a reason why we all have different territories. We're inherently territorial, can't help it, it's instinctive. Try putting all the City Masters in one place? Completely suicidal. They stay far apart in their own cities because too many alpha-type personalities make us aggressive and violent. Each shelter will have to have a very harsh hierarchy, violently enforced, with everyone knowing who's where." Andre explained. "Much more so than usual even, absolute control at every level to keep everyone functional.

"During our meeting at the MLFC it was decided, unanimously, that Namach should be in charge of selecting which vampires go where. Not choosing who it is who gets to survive necessarily, but choosing among those who do survive which ones will stay where. He knows everyone, he can outfight everyone, and everyone was willing to submit to a full mind and soul reading by him to determine how to place everyone for the least problems. And then he's the best choice to advise those who will wind up at the top of the chain, because once in the shelters they'll have to keep a bunch of very powerful vampires, who are used to running things themselves, obedient and functional." Daray finished, having apparently given up on his last project and just tossed it in the pile.

"There hasn't really been a decision on how to choose who lives. Probably it will be the strongest, probably Namach will have final say, him and grandmother. Everyone trusts Cyala – Namach's got former apprentices that he'll keep around, Cyala doesn't, the family has its own shelter so she can be totally objective. Still she's really busy monitoring the world for demon magic so Namach has got an awful lot to deal with. I think he's got only one golem right now, I don't know how he's getting it all done. He's already gotten his own estates locked up in some bloodmagic way that no one else knows anything about. His own invention."

"I think his servants helped with that." Andre said.

"His servants?" Rahkesh asked, surprised. He'd never heard a whisper that Namach had vampires working for him, apart from the two that took care of his palace in Ethiopia.

"Thunder, every vampire lord has a private army of some sort." Andre said. "Namach's trained himself a small band, but they're fanatically loyal. Completely un-vampire-like really, concerned only with serving him. I'm sure he's set up his own shelter, a small one, for them to stay in. He does look after them well, so I hear. No one ever seems them, or hears from them, unless Namach wants them to, so it's safe to say any word about them at all is rumor or complete myth."

_I suppose, if you were his apprentice, you'd probably meet them._ Sygra said from around Rahkesh's shoulders.

_Great, more to think about._ Rahkesh replied with a sigh. The clock ticked, two minutes until the evening meal. The whole school would eat at 6, then they had an hour to rest, followed by two hours of combat practice. They began the morning hour and a half of combat practice at 6 the next day. Rahkesh lined up all of the Crystals he'd made so far. Examining each he selected the best and tagged it with a bit of wandless magic. He was keeping the best one as his own. It would have to be good, to manage his magic. In fact he might have to make one specifically for himself, channel all his basilisk venom and magic into it, plus the thunderbird's energy, bloodmagic channels to himself…there was a lot he could do…

"And you will probably have to." Namach murmured as he glided past behind Rahkesh, his voice so soft and gilded in bloodmagic as to be completely inaudible to anyone else but whoever he intended to hear it.

Rahkesh removed his magical tag from the perfect red orb. Well damn. He wasn't shielding well enough, not that he could really have kept Namach out if the vampire wanted to hear his thoughts. There were few enough who could get past Rahkesh's magical defenses using anything other than brute strength, Professor Namach was one of them.

His damaged hand was throbbing steadily, had been for hours. Rahkesh had been blocking it out, but now that he was finishing up and not concentrating so intently the pain was really coming through, grating his nerves raw. He really needed some time to relax a little. The break-neck pace he'd kept since that evening with his friends was starting to wear on his still damaged magic.

Daray raised his eyes from labeling a Crystal and flicked one eyebrow upward, a skill Rahkesh wished he had. Rahkesh shrugged, his blood must be smelling a little odd, or his heartbeat off, things a vampire would sense. Or maybe Daray had noticed his increasing twitchiness and the occasional sparks on his fingertips. Those hurt his right hand badly, but he wasn't really able to stop. Daray gave him a telepathic nudge.

_Want to go flying later?_

_We have combat class. _

_Exercising in your thunderbird form seems like it would probably help you heal. You've often said you have a better sense of your magic and body in that form. And no one will complain on me keeping my wings strong. If I ever get to be any use a spy I'll have to be capable. _

Rahkesh acknowledged that with a nod. Flying would allow him to really work on healing, let all that fiery power outand work his magical channels back to their proper order. And he just liked flying. It had always had a near-narcotic effect on him since he'd first touched a broom. The complete freedom he had found within the thunderbird was a little dangerous – it was _too_ nice. Rahkesh lost track of time, of the world, of everything but the magic and the freedom. Like any serious drug user he was helplessly addicted, and liked it far too much to consider that a bad thing. It was fortunate that Daray was the same about his demon form – the others just didn't understand, except perhaps Ally, who described similar feelings about hand to hand combat.

XXX

_How's it going?_ Rahkesh looked up from his work to see Sygra coiled on his desk. _Did flying help?_

_Immensely._ Rahkesh admitted. He and Daray had flown almost the entire length of the mountain range. It had taken all night and exhausted both, never mind the avalanches, floods, rockslides and general destruction Rahkesh had unleashed. Fortunately he'd selected pieces of the mountains where nothing lived. He had only barely had enough control to manage that, the thunderbird's magic flying through him had almost been too much to handle. But it had felt amazing and after indulging his animagus's nature he felt much better. Upon returning to Akren he'd decided to eat breakfast in his rooms while working on his newest problem.

_And the parseltongue research?_

_Not well. I've made a list of every parseltongue in our joined history. I can't find any time when we had this many parseltongues before. It just doesn't make sense. _Rahkesh said, putting his pen aside. He had a problem he couldn't answer and didn't understand, and that bothered him.

_When faced with a problem it is sometimes best to re-examine the source._ Sygra said thoughtfully. Rahkesh smiled wearily at his clever familiar.

_Yes, sometimes it is. Thank you Sygra._

_Someone has to point out the obvious._ Sygra said smugly, sliding off the desk to loop around his neck. _Can we apparate? Anything but flying. _Rahkesh reached to the small collection of anchoring stones that activated his wards. He cut his finger on a small needle and let a drop of blood fall on each stone. They were ordinary rocks, granite, and served to turn some of the wards on or off. The bloodmagic caused tingling in his damaged right hand, but no more.

_We're flying, and portkeying. I don't want to chance apparating._

Three hours later Rahkesh was back near Stonehenge. The fae had done a good job. Rahkesh hadn't even considered covering up what had happened so the muggles wouldn't notice. The fae had reburied the entire fortress and left it. Rahkesh could sense some old traces of parselmagic in the earth, old wards that hadn't been undone. Clearly the fae hadn't had the time to search it and take the place apart. They had gotten their people back, and their stolen library, given the state of what he had seen of the fortress there wasn't a whole lot else. It had been a flighty place, reflecting perhaps Voldemort' increasingly desperate situation. There wasn't much need to do a search and everyone had been awfully busy. Maybe it was time for an exploration into the entire fortress.

Rahkesh located the ruined remains of the entrance by the warped magic under the ground. He was invisible, using the magic of the yeck cap he'd gotten on the way into Akren his first year. This was so much a part of him that when the magic, attached to his head, fell around him it didn't cause him any pain.

Getting into the ruins was more of a problem. Rahkesh used his thunderbird form to work on the weather a little and slowly the sky grew thick with clouds. This was a skill Rahkesh was not good at and could barely do when in human form, but practice always helped and right now he was getting a lot of practice at doing magic in different ways. A light rumble of thunder made the muggles nearby leave. Feeling reasonably secure Rahkesh used wandless magic to slowly move away the earth.

The ceiling had fallen in and the floor was knee deep in rubble and dirt. Rahkesh closed up the hole in the ground behind him, and examined the roof. It was only barely staying up, a mix of rocks and dirt. Slowly he worked wandless magic into it, binding it in place.

_Sygra?_

_I smell dead bodies, old blood, a few rodents, a dead serpent…Rahkesh there's someone alive!_

Rahkesh spun to face the direction Sygra was looking in. It was an older part of the fortress, built long before Voldemort. The stone were old and worn, a small arched passageway leading off a hallway Voldemort had created. Old ruins? Something had existed here, a long time gone now.

_How many?_

_More than one…three…maybe._

Rahkesh examined the narrow stone passageway. It was intact, the only part of the fortress that seemed to be. Well built, better than Voldemort's huge halls, which appeared to have been critically lacking in support columns. And certainly better than his hallways, which mostly had flat ceilings. The arched stone structure must have been holding up the earth for a long time without obvious damage. Rahkesh could only sense traces of remnant magic, and it felt like Voldemort's…casting curses? Rahkesh wasn't good enough at sensing that sort of thing to tell. He knew a few werewolves who could identify spells cast centuries earlier, but it wasn't one of Rahkesh's talents. But he knew Voldemort's magic very well. A bitter touch of curse magic that made his magic ache a little…a cruciatus curse? Possibly.

Wandlessly conjuring light, a shimmering golden orb hovering just over his shoulder, Rahkesh started down the passageway.

At once he knew it was a prison; cells lined the walls behind barred iron doors. An old medieval prison, decrepit, dark, cold, damp, but still standing, rusted chains and all. There were dead bodies in two of the cells. The dim golden light glanced off the crumpled decaying forms and the stench threatened to gag Rahkesh as he turned away and kept going. There were living people down here. Water dripped slowly from the ceiling, Rahkesh's foot clipped an old chain lying on the floor and the rusted creek startled something in one of the cells into twitching.

Rahkesh pushed the unlocked door open. The lock lay shattered on the floor under broken ceiling stone. Probably taken down during the earthquake he'd caused. The doors rusted hinges shrieked in protest. There against the wall, covered in a ragged filthy scrap of cloth was a human form, twitching against the wall. Bony fingers grasping the edge of the cloak over its eyes.

Rahkesh crouched down several paces away, wary, but not too frightened. Gently he pulled the cloak away from the figure.

Fangs flashed as wild red eyes shot open in an emaciated skull-like head. Rahkesh struck, slamming the vampire aside as it lunged for him.

The vampire hit the wall, so weak that Rahkesh's backhand had been enough to take it off its feet. It crumpled to the floor in a heap, unmoving. Rahkesh slowly felt out magically, it was unconscious. It was a magical vampire, but this was just an ordinary magical vampire, not one of the Akren-trained warriors Rahkesh was used to dealing with. Probably not very old, his magic didn't have the same feel to it as that of the five hundred years and older vampires. Given what Rahkesh was used to sparring with this creature was unlikely to be any major trouble. Rahkesh carefully worked wandlessly to bind his hands and feet with magic and transfigured rope. Then he bound its mind into unconsciousness. There was little purpose to this, he was sure it had nothing to tell him. But not to ask might mean missing something of interest, if not actually useful.

Leaving the vampire Rahkesh continued, the next cell also held a person. This one chained to the wall with solid black chains of a type of metal Rahkesh could not identify. The person and cell stank so horribly Rahkesh very nearly vomited. By the amount of excrement this person had been here a long time. Their clothes were torn badly, and Rahkesh could see ribs spiking out of the starved emaciated form. Voldemort took no care with his prisoners.

Rahkesh again pulled a scrap of dark blanket from the person. This individual was sleeping, or comatose. Rahkesh had never seen what a human looked like when starving to death, but as the skull emerged he knew he'd had that question answered. Eyeless sockets gaped, scabbed over where the eyes had been torn out. It took Rahkesh a few long minutes of staring to recognize the features, it was his old classmate, Gregory Goyle.

Clearly he had somehow run afoul of Voldemort. Using the mind magics Professor Masamba had taught them for assessing someone's mental state Rahkesh checked on him carefully. Goyle's mind was gone, lost to an overdose of the cruciatus curse. He was obviously blind, nearly deaf from some sort of infection, starved past the point of recovery and nearly comatose. Rahkesh, unsure if he could safely cast a killing curse, reached out, trying not to cringe as his fingers touched Goyle's hairless head. Gently he thought out what he wanted to happen, and sent a bolt of magic into his brain, stopping all functions and severing his spine where it joined his head. Goyle dropped, dead. Rahkesh's maimed hand throbbed in protest to the severing magic. As it was using magic to identify Goyle's mental state had not bothered him, an improvement, but this magic hurt. A shock of magic to disrupt brain functions was not lethal to any healthy person, though it might give them a horrible headache or knock them unconscious. To someone in Goyle's state it was deadly. Rahkesh noted this and decided he'd have to practice that, with most normal dueling currently unavailable to him some other methods of quick killing might be necessary. Perhaps he could work out a way to make that kill anyone.

_That was for the best_. Sygra hissed softly. _There's one more._

Down further into the prison it got smaller, the ceiling lower. The hallways here was elevated, with the cells a step down one either side. The cells had dirt, old blood, and seeping water in them. The carefully cut stones holding the place up must have been very solid, this part looked even older than the upper sections. A crumpled skeleton lay in one cell, it was very small, possibly the body of a child.

At the very end Rahkesh passed three more dead bodies, his eyes watering form the unventilated air, the stench making him chock back vomit. There against the wall of a cell at the end was the last living person. Chained to the wall and curled up on a tattered cloak the man wasn't moving. Rahkesh noted that he was breathing steadily, but did not wake at Rahkesh approach. Years of training had led Rahkesh to become very good at moving quietly, but in the stillness of the prison the man ought to have awakened, if he was in any shape to wake.

There was no door to the cell, Rahkesh sensed old wards and enchantments, but they had been cast by Voldemort and had fallen with his death. Rahkesh stepped into the cells and knelt, this one was in better shape than the vampire or Goyle. Not nearly so starved, and to Rahkesh's magical senses he seemed healthy.

Rahkesh gently pulled the hood away from around his face and nearly fell over backward when he found himself looking at the bloody face of Severus Snape.

XXX

"It's noon, and it's sunny outside. This had better be good." Lord Asano, the City Master of Tokyo and Lord of the Japanese vampires said darkly. The Conclave had been called to an emergency session. They were in a hall that had _windows_, and the sunlight coming in was irritating the vampires. All present were old enough, of magical blood, and powerful enough that it didn't harm them any. All of them could go for days in full sunlight if need be, but being able to withstand something didn't mean you _liked_ it. The vampires, far too proud to show any annoyance, were seated in ranks in one section of the seats in a display of force. The seats happened to currently be fully lit by the sunlight. This was deliberate. Anandi had chosen them as a statement to any other life forms who cared to notice, and notice most of them would, and to Tristan Namach, who had called the meeting. In his case the seating arrangement was done more as a statement of loyalty and to impress than anything else.

"Did someone offend Stocklir?" Hadrian asked mildly from behind the two thousand year old Japanese vampire. "Choosing a hall full of sunlight would be her way of responding."

"Not that I've heard of." Konovalov responded. Resplendent in black and silver the Russian didn't look at all bothered by the sun's glare.

"Given that Tristan called everyone I suppose there is some great happening." Bashadri, Master of Madrid, pointed out. There were a few murmurs of agreement; Namach did not tolerate wasted time.

"It must be, he's got enough to be doing." Hadrian agreed. "Probably something about the demons, and _very_ important," he added, more softly, eyes flicking over to a slightly amorphous shadow against the wall. Konovalov glanced over, and away quickly, nodding, their Master's servants were never actually _seen_, but to have one present at all was shocking. None of the other vampires noticed, but Namach's former apprentices had learned to sense their Master's mysterious servants.

Namach had made no secret of how much effort he was putting into selecting vampires and placing them. By now most everyone had given into the reality that it would be the semi-official Lord of the Vampires to make the final choices. Most of the vampires present were secure in the knowledge that they would be chosen. Namach's former apprentices, including Hadrian, Anandi, Asano, and Konovalov were not so sure of that. Asano was old enough to remember the centuries following the Vampire Lord's extermination of most of their kind, and he had met the survivors first hand and heard their horror stories…until Tristan permanently silenced them too.

Delegates of various species trickled into the room, most of them having been called upon without any warning and told to report in immediately. The sight of a solid block of vampires present and ready to begin unnerved more than a few, apparently one species had not been surprised by the summons.

Finally, with the last little gold fairy appearing in a flash of light and a quick apology, Mrs. Stocklir, standing next to the podium, glanced over to her right. Shadows rippled out from the walls and Tristan Namach appeared. The vampire walked up to the podium, conjured a table beside it, and placed a tiny black disc on the table.

"The complete, translated, memories of the demon sorcerer who led the attack in Mexico." Namach stated, firing a beam of red light into the black disk from a fingertip.

A shadowy black screen erupted from the orb, covering the windows and the entire front of the room, before the astonished gasps and shocked questions could finish swirling memories engulfed the room, Sharahak's clear voice translating over everything.


	23. Chapter 23

Sorry I'm not responding to reviews here, and that I didn't give an idea of how long this would take. I just finished moving between continents...and hemispheres...it's taken a while.

-

Chapter 23

Rahkesh left the hall behind the MLFC delegates. There were refreshments in the maze of waiting rooms and corridors, and groups gathered to snack and discuss the day's revelations. Rahkesh had missed most of Namach's presentation of the demon sorcerer's memories and most of his analysis of what was contained in there. It really was about time Namach finally got around the figuring that out, the demon's mind must have put up an amazing fight for it to take so long. He wondered how Namach had finally gotten through or around the demonic magics. Probably he'd used bloodmagic, but Rahkesh didn't think there was any field of magic Namach was an expert in, so maybe not.

Rahkesh was finding himself without enough time in the day to do everything that needed doing. Apart from his studies and combat practice taking up most of his time he was also hopping back and forth from the Conclave (now with a portkey like those provided to the actual delegates). And he still had to figure out what to do about his disintegrated wand, and Severus Snape. Namach's emergency meeting had called him away from dealing with his captured vampire, and so now Rahkesh also had to find the time to look through one of the many copies of the demon sorcerer's memories for anything useful.

Sharhak's wingtips were visible over the crowd, he was standing with Namach, surrounded by a group of vampires, all of them talking very quietly and seriously about something. Rahkesh guessed Sharahak was fine, the vampire/demon seemed to have firmly allied himself with Namach. Given that Sharahak would have great difficulty being a free wanderer now that he was a demon this was probably a good move for him. It also gave him more options when the demons finally attacked, vampires were always focused on survival, and Namach would be the best possible ally once the invasion began. Rahkesh spotted Minister Yi, from South Korea, one of the human delegates, and slipped through the crowd towards him.

"Afternoon Minister." Rahkesh said, moving around beside the gold-robed man.

"Ah Rahkesh! Good to see you again."

"And you. How is your son?" Rahkesh asked.

"Doing very well, thank you. He's rather pleased with himself, speaking to snakes and all. I'm afraid his poor grandmother – my wife's mother – isn't quite so pleased."

"Remind her that snakes eat vermin?" Rahkesh suggested with a smile. Minister Yi chuckled.

"That she likes, seeing them actually swallow a mouse whole puts her off her food." The cheerful bouncy man said, rocking on his toes. Then he turned serious, though the continuous movement didn't cease. "I read in the papers all about those poor children the other basilisk and you uncovered."

"Actually he found them, he's just hyper-phobic of the press." Rahkesh grumbled, sounding annoyed. "I did agree to try to deflect the press, but I would rather have most people know that most of that fight was on him. Except for when the Master of Vienna stuck his nose in." Minister Yi was a gossip, though an unusually intelligent one. He would repeat that to everyone who asked. Given that everyone would see him talking with Rahkesh, and with the recent destruction of Europe's resident madman, people would ask. Rahkesh could safely assume Yi would tell everyone that Harry Potter had done most of it, then gone away to avoid the publicity.

"Understandable. How are they?"

"I haven't had the time to check. Mr. Ramdas has them now, he's getting help from a few of the vampire parselmouths, and he has found a few counselors to help them. None of them have families."

"Good, good. Is it…at all odd? To have so many parselmouths?" Minister Yi asked. Rahkesh was relieved that he apparently didn't know, or didn't comment on all of the new young parselmouths being from Britain. That, more than anything, was what worried Rahkesh, though he wasn't about to discuss that now.

"Very odd. I can find nothing in any of our combined knowledge to indicate more than two ever being born in the same decade." Rahkesh admitted, "except in cases of identical twins or triplets who were all parselmouths."

"Very odd indeed." Minister Yi looked concerned.

"Well it may be that Voldemort did something to create so many parselmouths. I don't doubt your son is the real thing though. He ought to be – there are only two other natural ones around, myself and Potter, and we're a decade older." Minister Yi nodded, smiling into his wine glass and rocking side to side a little as they walked out of the way of a few centaurs. "The other remote possibility is magical fluctuations causing a surge in parselmouth numbers. I find that highly unlikely, but we've got at least seven parselmouths between six and eight years of age. It has to be considered."

"I didn't get here until near the end," Rahkesh said, "what was in that demon's memories that was so important?"

"Their attack plans, sort of." Minister Yi said, eyes shining as he rocked around on his toes. Rahkesh resisted the urge to steady him before he fell over.

"Sort of? What was there?"

"No portal locations – the demons are too clever for that. They kept their advance attack team ignorant of any other portals just in case. But they had to tell them some stuff. The demon army…Rahkesh it's huge! They've got a third of a million demons fully trained and ready to invade!" The South Korean Minister said, showing the first signs of real panic. "It's not like there are so many of us as to overwhelm them with numbers. More likely it will be the other way around. There really aren't many magical humans; it's why we're such a tight community. Even with all sentient magical life on Earth combined, the demon population is far larger. They're only sending a fraction of their military as the initial invasion force."

"What do we humans have to fight with?" Rahkesh asked.

"The military people figured out that we've got, for the humans, maybe twenty thousand with real dueling training, dueling, as in fighting other humans with magic. And an even smaller number who are trained against lots of other species…well we can add in some of the people who work with magical creatures I suppose, but our forces are mostly just aurors."

"Troubling indeed. What are the attack plans?" Rahkesh already had a good guess as to the size of the army, Sharahak had not been part of demon society, not really, but according to him every demon alive knew everything that was happening and were already looking forward to the invasion. Apparently the demon society wasn't so different from the humans really, they even had newspapers.

"Well the good news is that at the time that demon army left home the Demon King and his advisors had decided that it would be best if the muggles didn't know they exist. Then the muggle might turn on them and that could make things much harder. Plus if the muggles don't know then the demons can take or kill all the magical life currently here, and still have a steady supply of new muggleborn magical people every year. So we won't need to worry too much about the muggles finding out." Minister Yi told him, Rahkesh already knew this as well.

"They have a king?"

"Yes, plus an advisory council, which, oddly enough, is elected."

"And apparently they have a huge population."

"Yes. But Sharahak told us that."

"What else about their attack plans?"

"A bit different from any warfare we've seen. They're planning four waves of invasion, first to completely demoralize and destroy. They're going after the cities and towns first, the ones that are entirely magical, and that includes the fae cities and centaur herds. Take or kill everyone there, causing everyone left to scatter and become disorganized. That way they can bring in magic detecting enchantments and their non-battle-trained sorcerers. By detecting magic use they can then pick off the little groups they're sure we'll split into." Minister Yi sounded depressed.

"They have some good tacticians." Rahkesh said grimly, realizing that the demons plan would probably work. With all major centers destroyed everyone would naturally split into small groups, untrained civilians would be easy to round up with such a large army. "Anything on how they detect magic?"

"Good news and bad news. The techniques they use currently detect intentional and accidental magic. Bad news is that most everyone from most species gives off magic unconsciously. One of the werewolf chiefs, Brandon, is an expert on that – average for humans is some bit of magic every two hours. Not regular-like, almost random. And that's when waking. When sleeping, when dreaming, most people will create some tiny bit of magic every hour, again not regular. Other species are pretty similar. Well, those that we know about. No one's studied the fairies, or the Vashora, or the Vascari. It isn't enough magic to _do_ anything, just tiny bits of magic floating off, more when stressed."

"And the demons can detect that."

"Yes. It's some new trick. After they got into Atlantis they couldn't get everyone because they didn't have this trick yet. They didn't have it the time they raided earth before that either, or the time before that. However, before that there was another intelligent life form here, and the demons created a very good manner for detecting _their_ magic. Good enough that they captured the entirety of that species."

"Did the elves tell us that?" Rahkesh asked, startled.

"No. Lord Namach, or whatever the vampires call him. He's gotten into the elven libraries a couple of times." Minister Yi said. Rahkesh fought back a grin. Namach and the elves were an amusing, if puzzling mystery. Such an odd relationship.

"How good is the method they've worked out for us?"

"That's the good news; it's probably not too good. You heard Sharahak?"

"Yes. When the demons do something right they boast about it a lot. Politics there. If their military had developed something perfect or near perfect they would have made sure every demon knew about it." Rahkesh had arrived in time for that small reassurance.

"Yes, and he'd never heard any mention of this magic thing they've thought up so it can't be even near perfect."

"But, really, how good does it have to be?" Rahkesh sighed.

"True. The public relations group is writing up a recommendation, for print in all the papers, that, when the time comes, those who want to try to hide rather than kill themselves should do so alone or in twos and threes. The demons will have a much harder time finding them if they hide amongst muggles, and are alone. The demons don't want squibs, remember? If everyone who won't commit suicide hides alone, and doesn't use magic ever again, they might be safe."

"Right up until they have children, who produce much more accidental bits of magic than anyone else."

"And who will certainly be caught. The demons know children produce much more. They know that children sometimes produce massive amounts. An adult who is well trained at using their magic gives off much less. A child, who cannot be trained because the demons would definitely detect deliberate magic use, will give off a great deal more."

"So, really, hiding like that is not solution. Muggleborn witches and wizards will still be taken."

"Yes." Minister Yi agreed.

_And so something else will have to be done._ Rahkesh decided. Now someone just had to think of something.

XXX

"And here I was thinking only vampires might enjoy bathing in blood." Tristan Namach said slowly as Rahkesh Asmodaeus (Thunder to everyone trained at Akren) limped into his rooms. The handsome young man had clearly just come in from the morning combat training session. He was splattered in drying blood, head to toe, his clothes ripped in a manner that suggested blades, gashed and sliced flesh shown oozing red through the rips. He smelled like gunpowder, so they must have been training with muggle weapons, and he had his tasers and knives strapped on, plus several throwing stars and half a hundred potions. He was filthy, and had so many residual curses flickering around as they died that Tristan had to switch his vision back to normal vampiric because the sight of the magic actually made his eyes hurt when he studied it.

The only thing not torn or covered in blood and dirt was the Akren crest sewn onto his left shoulder; a book held open by a sword with a bloody tip, with an eye on one page and a Dragon's Death flower vine on the other. A beautiful rose-like blood red flower that glittered on a shiny dark green vine with black veins in the leaves, the Dragon's Death Flower was the most lethal plant on Earth, every bit as deadly as it was alluring. The lower end of the vine curled and tiny blood drop leaked out (inside the blood drop, almost too small to see, if one cared to look closely, would be Earth). A scroll lay beneath the book, with the school motto on it. Behind the book was a phoenix, for eternity, and the whole thing was inside a ring of fire. The fire happened to have as many tall flames as there were peaks in the Akren Mountain chain, but Tristan only knew that because he'd been there when it had been designed. Any outsider wouldn't know that, or see the tiny hidden bits, or the back of the crest on the other side, which was far more telling really. Naturally the school's insignia was as clean and neat as it had been when it had been sewn on. Nvara wanted her students affiliation displayed openly, unless on some sort of secretive business. Students could use their own judgment as to what that meant. Most of them were wearing the crest all the time. Which was very odd indeed for such a violently independent bunch, but they were fighting something that threatened all of them, and so the students and alumni were a bit more centralized around Akren then was normal.

"You did say this needed to be done immediately." Rahkesh said, somewhat apologetically, brushing loose hair out of his eyes he tilted his head sideways and caught sight of the vampire drawing a breath, smelling for serious injury in his fresh blood probably. Rahkesh had already healed the worst of it, he grinned and added slyly "and I had this notion that all vampires appreciate bloodstains on the carpet." Namach's lips twitched into a smirk, followed by an amused shake of his head.

Rahkesh limped around Eli, and the magical lizard, for once, didn't try to maul him. That was a good thing; he didn't have the patience for the beasts temper. He _hurt_, really, really bad. He hadn't taken injuries like this in a long time. Though there were no potions or poisons involved, so he could have all the damaged healed by the time lunch was over. He could feel his shirt rubbing at the edges of torn flesh where a knife had gone deep in his shoulder muscle. It had been a rough training session. Fighting in groups under the direction of the instructors, synchronized attack formations followed by a three hour hit-and-run guerrilla fighting practice session. He'd done better at the later – Rahkesh was not really cut out for conventional military tactics, but in small teams or alone he was very good.

His magical difficulties prevented Rahkesh from using most of the magics he normally would have. His bloodmagic was healing fast and he'd had to utilize it a lot, his wandless abilities were improving faster than ever now that he was relying on them so much, but the magic hurt and his mind magics were not going terribly well. Restricted in his magic usage Rahkesh had taken some heavy cursing from students he ordinarily would have outfought. And getting the curses off was much more difficult. Had he been able he would have compensated with threadmagic or metal magic. But threadmagic was out of the question and he had not had the time to work out some ways to use what little he knew of metal magic. He was hoping to have time to get out his notes on feather magic, and the feathers of some magical birds, stuff he'd learned from his Chachapoyaro friends, which no one at Akren would be able to recognize (except for Daray and Silas), but he hadn't had the time.

The ancient vampire just looked amused and gestured back into another room. The doorway was hung with a thick wall of hanging beads, inside was a wide well lit hallway. Rahkesh had only ever seen the main sitting room and office of the vampire's quarters, but apparently they were very extensive. The floor was white marble, with a winding mosaic down it in sapphires, probably real ones, with silver around their edges. The torch brackets were obsidian with pearls, the wall hangings ancient silk mosaics, the largest of which depicted Namach, in Ice Dragon form in a regal pose atop a cliff over a gorge, with snowy mountain peaks visible behind and below, and an erupting volcano off against the left edge. The silk tapestry had red silk tassels around the edges, and phoenix feathers. In the lower right corner in a language Rahkesh didn't know was some writing, below it, much smaller, and in English, was the vampire's name. Rahkesh didn't have to wonder if Namach had made the tapestry himself, it reeked of his bloodmagic – and therefore probably had many purposes that had nothing to do with artwork. Namach led him into the first room on the left. Here they were well inside the mountain, no windows. A variety of silver equipment sat on a wide heavy wooden table.

"How did it go?"

Rahkesh sat down and watched as Namach picked up a needle. "Well enough I suppose. Could have been better." Namach slid the needle into the vein in Rahkesh's right wrist and withdrew a small amount of blood. A flick of the vampire's fingers healed the puncture over as soon as the needle was out. Rahkesh wondered how the vampire was dealing with the smell of so much magically charged blood. He didn't look affected at all.

"A non-answer."

"Well I'll never get an award for my skills as a foot soldier in a conventional war." Rahkesh joked, "but I did come up with some neat tricks for our unit, and I fight pretty well on a broom, but I'm at my best flying alone. And the guerilla warfare session went off perfectly. Except after I and my team of six took out our thirty opponents I got cornered by our resident lion fae." Rahkesh said, "they've got claws even in hominid form. I did manage to send them all into a trance, but it took some doing. And…I think I broke Chenzira's claws…so I suppose I should expect retaliation from enraged lionesses."

Namach actually laughed.

"Not funny." Rahkesh sighed, holding out his arm. Namach took his arm, the vampire's fingers flicked and danced over his skin as he set all of Rahkesh's bloodmagic runes tingling and lighting up, then pulled out what appeared to be a fake human arm made of wood and copied all of the runes onto it. "How do you do that?" Rahkesh asked.

"Copy the runes? They're just designs."

"No, the other part. Make someone else's bloodmagic react to you?" Rahkesh asked, watching curiously as all the runes faded as Namach let go of him.

"Can't tell you that." Namach smirked, "and there's many a bloodmage who'd give a leg to know how that's done."

"Just have to figure it out on my own then." Rahkesh said. "I got a lot practice at dodging today – haven't yet managed a magical shield wandlessly in a way that doesn't hurt. But I am getting much better at minor transfiguration, and very good at deflecting or redirecting spells. I did manage to suffocate six of our werewolves into unconsciousness, then managed a trick on a few humans that, had I actually been trying, would have caused blood clots in the brain. I've been talking with Sharahak – demons can have strokes. This is one injury that may turn out very useful."

"Did you have to use either animal form?"

"No. No one was allowed to be anything but their most-hominid-like form, or their primary, whichever that was. It would have helped, but I don't want to be dependent on those. Muggle weapons work just fine. And I dodge very well."

"Were you at the emergency meeting of the MLFC?"

"Yes, though I was late, missed most of it. Minister Yi gave me an update."

"He's a good leader, but not a fighter. Fortunately he knows when to listen to those who are." Namach said. "The demon's memories had some good information on what type of demon we can expect. The first assault will have plenty of sorcerers, plus less magical demons, and a regiment of arch demons."

"Uh oh."

"Hmm. I expect I can personally handle half a hundred or so. But the really old ones are enormous and very hard to kill. Like dragons without wings, capable of walking on two legs or four. None too bright, basically walking destruction machines. There might be two hundred or more of them in the first wave."

"Wonderful, bloody wonderful. And they're going just for killing and maiming the first go-round?"

"Yes. Rip us up then send in hunters and trackers to catch those who are running while the second wave sets in on the groups resisting or fighting back."

"What do you think our chances really are?" Rahkesh asked softly, watching as Namach magically secured the potions on the table.

"Not good." Namach said. "Not good at all. I have no doubt some will survive, but the demons will likely destroy everything else and wreck Earth for a while. And unlike last time this time they don't intend to leave. They cannot survive here for long, not comfortably, but this time they're going to try to keep a continuous presence to keep gathering muggleborn magical people."

"Anything new from the elves?"

"They're still waiting. They're very patient with iomportant things. I expect they'll wait for a while before doing anything. They've waited a long time for Earth, and they don't want to mess up again."

"Waited a long time for Earth?" Rahkesh repeated, confused.

"Rahkesh the thing the elves want more than anything else is for some other species to become as capable as they are. They've been waiting for millions of years, searching the galaxies. And every time they think they've found allies the demons show up. The elves will not protect us; they don't want friends who are helpless. They want worthy companions in this universe. Earth has for a long time been their best shot at finding that. They thought that's what they had finally found when Atlantis rose. For a long time the Earth species and the elves were best of friends. But when the time came the fight the demons, the Earthlings couldn't manage it. And the elves had to come in and kill off a lot of their friends to stop the demons from gaining an even larger slave force, and to lock them in the demon realm. Elves do not lightly let friends die, much less kill them. It's in their nature to commit completely or not at all. They're not going to make that mistake again. If we prove we can stand up to the demons then yes, we can count on them and they'll be only too glad to join us in this universe as equals, or near-equals, quasi-equals, since we still won't be any match for them. But they'll not befriend life forms who are just going to get slaughtered." Namach explained.

"I still don't see why that has you worried about them going after me." Rahkesh said, having figured out more or less what had been troubling the vampire for so long.

"Not something you need to worry about right now." Namach sighed. "And I no longer think they'll be as likely to kill you for what you might become."

"Which _is_?"

"You know and it'll be far more painful, and much more likely to kill you." Namach replied, then he smiled, "all the evidence is there, you figure it out. I'll give you a hint: I guessed it the day you showed me your first bloodmagci work." Rahkesh rolled his eyes around and glared, Namach actually chuckled. "How does the wandless magic feel?"

Apparently he would get no more out of the ancient vampire. "Actually some of the wandless stuff is getting easier, but I can already feel changes." Rahkesh said, not trying to stay on the former topic, it would be useless attempt.

Namach's eyes flicked over to him as the vampire pulled out a shimmering bottle of some potion. "What sort?"

"Wandless magic that didn't hurt two days ago hurts more now." Rahkesh said, trying, unsuccessfully, to conceal his worry.

"Interesting. This one will hurt." Namach warned, gripping Rahkesh arm he magically pulled the potion out of the bottle and coated Rahkesh's hand in it.

Rahkesh choked back a scream, jerking back in pain as the potion burned into him. Namach's powerful grip on his arm kept his hand steady as Rahkesh fought, trying not to writhe as he felt he potion eat into his flesh. Seconds later the sensation changed, now the potion was pulling, dragging away from him, drawing out damaged magic, Rahkesh's vision went black as every magical channel in his body lurched in agony against the draining. Lightning shrieked through the room and thunder boomed as he fainted.

The vampire ignored the lightning as it glanced harmlessly off him, and mentally strengthened the wards against the thunder rolling around them. He had expected that Rahkesh would not be able to stop his natural reactions to foreign magic. He had also expected Rahkesh to pass out, and once he did the animagus's magic exploded out in a subconscious defensive move that was completely uncontrolled and had no recognition of friend or foe. It was lethal killing magic, with no direction. Anyone who ever managed to actually kill Rahkesh had better kill themselves as quickly as possible, before the magical backlash hit. There was enough fury in that thunderbird that if Rahkesh was ever murdered the magic that poured into the thunderbird from his death and soul would be enough to take a country apart.

Lightning ripped at him, Tristan just chuckled at the insane raging and channeled the lightning bolts through himself with his bloodmagic, feeling nothing from them. His endless bloodmagic work over three thousand years was the only thing keeping Rahkeshs' magic from killing him. But with such extensive magics, designed for every possible situation, he could withstand the hurricane of violence unscathed. Rahkesh's blood, filled with electricity and magic, began to hiss and steam off his clothes. Well that was different. Sure they already knew Rahkesh's blood was flammable, and hopefully he'd be into offensive fire-based bloodmagic very soon, but this was weird. Tristan sniffed the air, turning his sense of smell back on after shutting it down as soon as Rahkesh had entered his rooms. His blood smelled different again, in a very bad way. He inhaled deeply, and fought back a heady rush at the scent of Rahkesh's magically charged potent blood. Something was different. Tristan filed away Rahkesh's new scent as something to _not_ react to. Thousands of years of training had produced an absolute self-control that overrode even the magics that made his own existence possible. Now clear-headed and feeling not the slightest reaction to Rahkesh's blood the ancient vampire concentrated on what had changed.

Almost immediately he realized what it was. Changes in blood chemistry like what Rahkesh had undergone since drinking the raw dragon blood could only come about this strongly through an actual genetic change, one that affected every cell in the body. Tristan was no geneticist, though he did keep up to date on all muggle science, but he recognized instinctively that Rahkesh wasn't quite human anymore. The newest difference meant that he was off-human enough…that he'd never be having any children. His DNA would be incompatible. Tristan didn't know what his student's long-term plans were, he suspected Rahkesh didn't have any, but children were no longer an option, not even with magical aide.

Tracing the disintegrated wand remains the vampire followed them into Rahkesh's magic and the rooms' wards were put to the test as Rahkesh's magic flew apart at the minor invasion. Lightning screamed around the room until it almost felt like solid mass, basilisk venom seeped from Rahkesh's pores until the air became lethal and the magic increased to a level high enough to make even Tristan's skin itch. But his own defensive bloodmagic dealt with the attacking magic, sliding it off and around, then off again in every direction as it came back to try again. He began to filter the air as well, using his bloodmagic to do it, draining the aerosalized venom out of it to stop Rahkesh's poison from harming either of them. He felt Rahkesh's mind start to seriously retreat and quickly completed the examination.

The damage was even more localized than he'd thought. But that meant that the magic caught up and distorted by the disintegrated wand was more than he'd thought. Magic filled a magical creature, and when Rahkesh's magic was in that hand it became distorted, and some of it got stuck there. What continued through Rahkesh's soul and body was warped and the strain of bringing it back into normal levels would slowly kill Rahkesh. But before that the magic stuck his hand would become critical and eventually reverse and tear him apart. Tristan estimated three weeks, then withdrew from Rahkesh's magic.

Another deep breath and he identified another, much smaller, change. The ancient grimaced as he realized that Rahkesh's blood might actually have seriously addictive properties. Just wonderful. His student would _love _hearing that. Rahkesh had come farther in less time than any other student he'd ever trained (except perhaps Daray), but his little experiment with dragon's blood was going to cost him if this change was permanent.

The sparkling potion came off and Tristan directed it into one of the large silver bowls. It ought to contain residue from the wand. For a moment he considered ripping the disintegrated wand out of Rahkesh's magical channels entirely. It was all localized enough that this would be possible. But almost immediately he rejected the idea. Rahkesh's blood had changed yet again, signifying a much more worrisome change on a genetic level. The chemicals in his body would be changing again soon too, probably as soon as he ate. Taking out the wand remains that way would leave gaps that might be filled in and permanently blocked. Better to use all other means first.

Rahkesh woke with a groan. "What you call "hurt" everyone else calls "agony"." He muttered to the vampire. He was slouched sideways in the chair, but felt fine.

"It shouldn't have hurt that much." Namach said, not entirely truthfully, adding some gold colored potion to a silver bowl. He wasn't about to acknowledge that his definition of pain was a little warped, and so perhaps a stronger warning might have helped. "However your blood has gone and changed again."

"Damn it." Rahkesh muttered, letting out a breath, "okay, just how crazy is my life now?"

"Better find some stronger language, this time it's really bad." Namach warned, then explained what he'd discovered about Rahkesh's blood. Rahkesh forgot English entirely and lapsed into parseltongue curses.

XXX

"It's a good thing my plans didn't involve leaving the school today." Rahkesh muttered, watching as lights that looked almost like an aurora borealis – except that it was barely sunset and this was pure magic – roiled over the valley and mountains. He _had_ had plans to leave, he had things to do. But the wards were all being activated in a test run, and because the evaluation included examining how well the wards detected and concentrated themselves around those carrying the Akren signal all the students had to be present.

Being stuck at Akren for the day did have one positive point. It was late evening and after a long exhausting day of training the students and faculty who weren't involved in examining the wards had dispersed to the hot springs. Rahkesh had joined a handful of friends and a few professors at one of the pools further away from the school. It was up a bit on the valley wall, and in the dull red sunset the whole valley was spread out before them, looking just a little surreal through the mists rising off the pool. Rahkesh was so busy lately that he hardly had time to sleep, much less just relax. Someone had added healing potions and relaxing potions to the waters of the pool and it felt just wonderful to lie around and do nothing for a few hours.

The spell dancing across his back was pulled off. Rahkesh, lying flat on his stomach, head resting on his arms, glanced over at Alexia.

"Completely healed." She said, "not even a scar."

"Thanks."

"Thanks for being my punching bag." Ally replied sweetly. She'd dislocated both his shoulders and his hip that afternoon. It had been agonizing. But not so bad as the magical duel, where he'd failed to dodge a particularly nasty burning spell that had turned patches of skin on his back to ash. He had, at least, managed to take out all of her finger and toe nails. It was a bit of wandless magic he was practicing in the hopes of working his way up to removing a demon's claws.

The students had taken to healing each other after their practice fights, on the idea that any damage you could cause you should be able to fix. Though in a real duel with a demon they'd be trying to kill, and it was a bit harder to fix that. Not that they'd want to. Rahkesh rolled off the rock ledge and slipped into the steaming water with a low groan. The Akren training schedule was brutal, but effective, everyone was improving very quickly.

They had spent a good part of the evening making the last of the Life Crystals. They would start on the next step to them tomorrow. The students had exceeded all expectations, making well over a thousand of them. Every Akren student and alumnus would have one, stored securely at Akren. The Crystals would drain a little bit of their life energy when they were healthy, too little to be noticed. They bodies could continually replenish just fine when healthy. And then when injured they'd ahve a huge reserve of personal life energy, which was best used for healing.

Daray had proved himself the best of them at making the Life Crystals, once he stopped throwing them away for not being pretty enough, or whatever bullshit reason he'd found. Rahkesh was looking forward to making a special one for himself sometime, but what he was really interested in was starting on their work with Akren's mass of bodies. Particularly the dinosaur skeletons. Ressurrecting those to fight with necromancy would be quite a feat, and amazingly useful. Rahkesh had all sorts of ideas for making the skeletons stronger and more dangerous. Never mind the dragon skeletons Namach had collected a hidden away in a school vault centuries earlier. Any demon that attacked Akren was going to wish it had never been born. Plus Namach was going to be selecting the best necromancy students to help him and the Necromancers Guild with animating the demon bodies they had, just to _really_ give the demons something to chew on.

Rahkesh rubbed at his injured hand, a dull ache had started and it didn't feel like it was going to stop anytime soon. Namach had said this wound would kill him eventually. Three weeks. Namach was examining his records and journals, and Rahkesh was expecting to start on a copy of Merlin's journal that night. Though Namach had warned him that Merlin didn't ever bother writing much down and only kept the barest of bullet-pointed notes. Rahkesh was already thinking that this was one problem he'd be fixing on his own.

With most bloodmagic the best ritual-runes had been invented already (almost always by Namach) and everyone attempting to achieve that effect just copied them and allowed for small personal alterations. This method worked very well as very few seemed to need much variation. Namach had created versions of every ritual for every species, two for most species – one for each gender. He'd done a good enough job of it that everyone who tried to create the rituals from scratch found their results being almost identical to his. But Rahkesh, even before the dragon's blood, had exhibited what would be considered huge variations. The difference between what he used and what a member of any known species should be using had just increased steadily since drinking Enireth's blood.

This had some advantages, it would make it hard for others to know what he was doing or to deliberately damage him through knowledge of his runes. However, at time like this, it was a distinct disadvantage because there was no one with runes like his. No one who knew what unusual reactions he should expect, or what weaknesses he had, or what the strongest parts were. What he could change without serious risk and what was absolutely essential.

In a way Daray was in similar position, as his bloodmagic was vastly different from what a vampire should do. In his case it was because he was partly demon, and because as one of Cyala's bloodline he could expect a bunch of variations simply because Cyala had many odd abilities and every individual in that family had additional gifts. Plus whatever family secrets there were that no one knew about.

But Rahkesh was mortal, mortal human – though not really anymore – and therefore he was at a more or less automatic disadvantage in bloodmagic compared to a vampire. Vampires lived on blood, they were so highly attuned to it that some of them could sense a tiny infection in your toe, by smelling your neck. They could apply that to their own blood and because they existed based on bloodmagic, sort of, they could sense their own blood and magic during a ritual. Tristan Namach had completely reinvented bloodmagic (or just plain invented, depending on who you asked) by building runes _during _his rituals, working as he went, relying on senses that were far beyond anything any vampire before him had had to notice problems before they became permanent. What he'd learned there he had then used to design complete rituals to extend his senses. Rahkesh had no such constant stream of information from his own blood and magic.

And so this was a problem that he was going to have to fix, even Merlin's records probably would not provide anything particularly useful, though maybe he could find some good hints to help him brainstorm ideas. The only guidance he'd be getting for this would be from Namach. Rahkesh's didn't doubt that the vampire had some method already thought out for getting rid of the disintegrated wand, that he hadn't suggested it meant that he thought there was a good chance that there was some other method they hadn't thought of. Rahkesh was going to be mostly relying on Namach's expert advice, and on his own intuition. His instincts were very good for bloodmagic, and he knew himself better than anyone else could, but the complete lack of direction was going to make it difficult.

Rahkesh rolled down into the steaming water further, and picked up a book written by a long-dead human bloodmage, of the third rank, on removing poisons from the blood. Removing a magical liquid from blood was hugely different from removing a formerly solid, and now purely magic, substance form someone's magic, but he was hoping for some inspiration.

"Has anyone tested how strong a demon's eyelid/eyescales are?" Silas asked, looking up from a book of disabling curses. He was leaning against a big rock, half in the water. Nuri was on top of the rock, his head coming out over the edge to rest on top of Silas's head.

"Cute Nuri." Ally said, "no, I don't think that's been tested."

"Might be a good thing to look at. Blinding them has to have similar effects to blinding someone else. Anything that's had sight all its life will be mostly incapacitated by the sudden loss of vision." Silas pointed out. "Nuri stop purring," he added as the vibrations from his familiar's purr caused his hands to shake, "or get off my head". Nuri purred louder, rubbed his chin across the top of Silas's head into a more comfortable position, and closed his eyes.

"He's a cat." Ally said as an annoyed look crossed Silas face, "your own fault for getting him."

"I couldn't just live a little panther kitten to those poachers." Silas said defensively. "How was I to know we'd wind up connected?"

"Because he's a cat and you're you." Daray said, swimming slowly out of the mists, Tyler, Haedil, Hanashi, Justin and Rianae followed him. Hanashi at once went to Nuri and scratched him between the ears. Nuri glared for a moment, then grudgingly began to purr, his eyes closing tightly. Daray settled onto some submerged rocks beside Rahkesh, Haedil sitting beside him. The fae turned Daray around and began healing the deep gashes he'd left in Daray's scalp earlier. Haedil had done a blood magic piece that allowed him to grow claws at will. They were the claws of his animagus, whatever that was, and he had turned them into magic and inserted them into his bloodmagic, a process that had taken him six months to fully recover from and which had almost killed him.

"Anyone else feel like they got caught without magic in an elephant stampede?" Haedil asked. The fae's skin was covered in a faint golden trace of bloodmagic runes. He'd gotten into a spectacular battle with a dozen other students. Rahkesh and Ally had joined him but even with the three of them it had been one of the toughest magical duels Rahkesh had ever fought, and not just because his magic was messed up.

"Elephants was it? I thought I got kicked by a dragon." Justin groaned. He still had a cast around his left ankle.

"I could probably heal that with threadmagic." Rianae offered.

"And then when the threads break my ankle's snapped again." Justin said.

"Not if it's been healed for more than a day, then your body would take over and it would become permanent."

"You haven't taken the threadmagic healing class." Justin said, "no offense but the potential for being messed up _worse_ is a little scary."

"I'm doing it independent study." Rianae said with a sniff. "And doing very well." She was something of a threadmagic prodigy. Rahkesh sometimes wondered at how odd it was; his group of Akren friends were all way above average for Akren students in one way or another. It seemed a little unlikely.

"Haedil how did you go about getting those claws into your bloodmagic?" Rahkesh asked.

"Thinking of trying it with your forms?"

"Maybe. I think I might be able to get the basilisk's fangs in human form without that, but Namach predicted when my animagus first showed up that I would have to use bloodmagic to work with it any." Rahkesh said. People with non-magic animagus forms usually didn't need any special help to manifest some of their animagus's attributes while human.

"I had to seek out how I had formed my animagus and once I understood why it was such a perfect reflection of my soul – it's a soul animagus – I created a two-stage rune piece to link my human hands and the claws, along with the transition. There's a guide on how to do it in one of the bloodmagic books Professor Namach wrote a thousand years ago. Very clever really." Haedil said. A soul animagus was an animagus that reflected the soul more than it did the mind. They were also always magical and much more difficult to handle having, as in order to transform you had to have first acknowledged all of the major aspects of your own soul, including the bad ones that most people denied or tried to justify. You couldn't be justifying your bad parts if you wanted to use your animagus if your animagus was soul based. Rahkesh had asked because he might be able to use the part of the bloodmagic that pulled Haedil's claws out of their magical state and into solid reality. Perhaps he could do something similar to pull out the wand that had been magically blasted into him.

A dark presence shimmered along the edge of Rahkesh's mind and he lowered his mental shields, ignoring the ache this caused. _Sir?_

_After examining your runes and blood I think you are safe to begin an in depth damage assessment._ Namach told him telepathically. _Open all your runes and find the changes, the blocks, what parts need the magic flows smoothed out. Once that is as healed as possible begin examining the wand remains. From my own analysis I would suggest looking at removing them the way you would remove a poison – through the removal location on your right wrist. However I cannot look at this from any direction but outwards-in, try looking at it from inwards-out. And go see Masamba about some of the mind magic candles._

_I think I need to learn how to make those myself, personalized ones usually work better._

_If you have the time left in your life – there is a lot you could do to improve your magical functioning, such a pity learning actually takes time. _Namach said dryly.

_In other words I should work more on bloodmagic training and make do with the usual magical candles when I need them._ Rahkesh translated.

_For now. If the opportunity should ever arise – unlikely given the coming war – then you should definitely take the candle-making class. As with most things you need something more personalized._ Namach sounded fondly amused at this. Rahkesh expressed his annoyance wordlessly. Why did he always have to be different? _Being normal is boring._

_Says someone who has __**never **__been normal._ Rahkesh replied, guessing that Namach had probably always been about as far removed from normal as Rahkesh was.

_Fortunate indeed, I don't know how I'd stand it._ Namach said with a snicker. _Would you rather be an average wizard and lead a dull life?_

_No. But one where I don't get ripped to bits regularly might be nice._ Rahkesh said wistfully. _But I wouldn't trade my magical abilities for anything, even if it is a pain in ass at times._

Namach's presence vanished, Rahkesh blinked and looked around, the vampires present had a slightly vacant look in their eyes as the magic left. Namach had not included them in the temporary telepathic link, but nor had he hid his presence from them. Consequently they had all reacted by just about going into a trance.

"I hope you don't do that on the battlefield." Ally said, guessing what was going on.

"No, just when we don't actually try not to." Daray replied, first to recover. "Hey, has anyone asked Sharahak if demons can turn into animals?"

"Yes, they can't." Rahkesh said. "I also talked it over with Professor Namach, he said that the demons weren't always what they are now – they used to have a different form. When they wiped out the intelligent species that came before any of ours they also incorporated that species into their own. They're actually now very different than they have always been. They didn't use to have wings. They improved their species a great deal, but they also cannot transform into anything else and transfiguring them is very hard."

"And how did Namach know that?" Hanashi asked.

"The elves." Daray and Ally replied at the same time.

"I hear he's gotten into their libraries a few times." Rahkesh agreed.

"Great, I guess I can give up my search for another animal form." Daray said.

"I thought you were actually finding something?" Ally asked.

"Not really. Bits of what I might have been." Daray said. "I might have had two animagus forms, not anymore and the remnants are fading fast." It was the first Rahkesh had ever heard him express any true regret about being part demon.

"What were they?" Rahkesh asked. It was an unspoken and never broken rule to not ask what anyone's animagus was, if they wanted you to know they'd tell you. Maybe the headmistress or another Professor might ask, but no one else would. But Daray's were gone.

"Uh uh, my secret." Daray said smirking.

"Squirrel." Silas decided, grinning. He'd gotten enough teasing over his difficulty finding his animagus and actually turning into it. Payback time. "Or maybe a porcupine."

"Not even close." Daray said, grinning.

"Butterfly." Haedil said over Daray's head.

"Like _I_ would ever be anything so ignoble." Daray replied, amused.

"No, he's pure flying monkey." Ally said, drawing laughter from the surrounding students.

XXX

The Dyalnos tree was growing well, nearly three meters tall. Rahkesh's growth potions and fertilizers, mixed with huge doses of his blood, had aided it greatly. Rahkesh touched the bark gently and could feel the response. Raised on his blood and magic the tree was deeply connected to him, almost a part of him really. Another few years and he might be able to sense its health telepathically, though the tree was just a tree and not conscious.

Rahkesh needed a new wand, the sooner the better. He had no knowledge of creating them, but Akren had classes on that, and plenty of books on wand making in the library. Rahkesh also thought that a new wand, one well tied to him, might be needed for the removal of the old one, disintegrated and blasted into the magical channels of his right hand. He hoped to use wood from this tree for it. The elves would throw the worst hissy fit of the last million years when they found out, but Rahkesh figured that with the tree so connected to him they might not sense what it was.

He would use the wood from the blood tree, but what else to use was a problem. Rahkesh was thinking of something much like the bloodmagic knife he'd made. A thunderbird feather and either basilisk venom or blood inside the wand, and then washing the outside of the wood in his human...or whatever...blood. But he didn't know how to go about making such a wand yet. And he hadn't had the time to learn. There was a wand-making seminar soon, every night for two weeks. It was the second in a four seminar series that taught very basic wand-making. Rahkesh hadn't taken the first seminar set, but he had studied several books on the subject and had passed the test to get into the second seminar.

Leaving the tree Rahkesh entered the house and went down to the basement level, where he had constructed prison cells. Light entered through a row of three small windows near the ceiling.

_Any change?_ Rahkesh hissed. From the window sill two snakes lifted their heads. Rahkesh had left Xasseri and Siraka to watch over the vampire, and Severus Snape. The two serpents had stayed at this property for months, keeping an eye on things, especially the growth of the elven tree in the greenhouse, and just enjoying a secure free life.

_None._ Xasseri said. _He smells healthy, his pulse is strong. _

Sygra slid off Rahkesh's shoulders to go join the other two in the sun. Rahkesh was using the basement of one of the small houses the Potter family owned (_had_ owned. Rahkesh owned it now. He'd transferred it through seven fake identities in the past two months). Silas had told him who to go to for the fake IDs, and how to use them, stuff he'd learned in his intro espionage class.

Rahkesh had kept both his prisoners under sleeping enchantments that he'd worked out with wandless magic. Plus he'd used some of the magical candles used in mind magic to help keep them deeply asleep while he worked. He was a little surprised that Snape's mind hadn't tried to fight it any. Voldemort must have really worked him over pretty bad. And now Rahkesh had to decide what to do with them.

He'd gotten some high quality vertiserum that Tyler had made, trading her some basilisk venom for it. Basilisk venom was hard enough to get that Tyler had claimed she'd gotten a much better deal. Apparently she thought brewing vertiserum wasn't so hard. The truth potion would do for the vampire, but Rahkesh wouldn't put it past Snape to have somehow worked out a way around it, or be immune to it. Snape was far too clever, one of the reasons Rahkesh was keeping him asleep with two snakes on guard. The vampire didn't worry him at all, but keeping Snape prisoner was a risky business.

He really didn't know what to do about Snape. Sure, he'd killed Dumbledore. However Rahkesh wasn't much interested in avenging the old man. A year previous he would have been, but that didn't interest him anymore. Not now, now that he knew so much about the world, and questioned Dumbledore's place in it. He hadn't heard his name mentioned at all by any of the human representatives of the MLFC. Had he still been alive Dumbledore might well have been a real problem. He would have undoubtedly tried to stop "Harry" from going to Akren – then he'd be outside Dumbledore's control, and Rahkesh suspected that the control issue would have been the only thing driving Dumbledore.

But Snape had still murdered someone, on Voldemort's orders. A murder that Malfoy hadn't been able to commit. Did that matter any? Rahkesh had certainly killed people. Rahkesh didn't know how loyal Snape had been to Voldemort. Or how loyal he'd been to Dumbledore. Possibly he'd just tried to survive both. Voldemort was dead. The demons were seven weeks away from invasion. Did he really care what Snape had or hadn't done?

Rahkesh realized unhappily that he did actually need advice about this. The vampire he would deal with today. Find out if he knew anything at all interesting. Then, then Rahkesh would have to locate a few of the former Order of the Phoenix members. Shacklebolt was back in Britain, working with his partner Tonks, trying to get people ready to fight or die. And keeping an eye out for demon activity. Rahkesh hadn't heard if the remnant Ministry was doing anything about building shelters. Probably not; they didn't have enough people.

And he needed to find Minerva McGonagal, because if anyone would know what to do with Snape, it would be her.

Rahkesh went upstairs and into the bathroom. Standing in front of the mirror he carefully removed the fake skin covering his lightning bolt scar. Then he wandlessly put his hair back to being messy. He followed that up by focusing and struggling until his eyes went back to the emerald they'd always been, devoid of the obvious changes the dragon's blood had given him. Next he covered up the visible scars on his arms, neck, and face. He didn't have very many, he healed very well – probably a leftover effect from his childhood, but Harry Potter only had one scar. He left the scars from the basilisk's bite and form Voldemort's ritual, those marked him clearly and he needed people to identify him. Then he went into the small room he had set up as a potions lab/storeroom and found some shrinking potion. Just a few drops, diluted with a potion to spread the effects over his body (and not just his tongue) he drank it. That was followed by a complete change of clothes and leaving some of his weapons behind. Harry Potter was back.

Going to another room Rahkesh found a two-way mirror that would connect to one owned by Remus.

XXX

"Do you know what Voldemort did to him?" Minerva McGonagal fussed as she paced back and forth across the room. Harry had relocated Snape to another small house, this one owned by Harry Potter. He kept nothing here except for a few changes of clothes. The furniture was nice, the house small and cozy with many fireplaces and thick rugs. Remus was there, along with Kingsley, Moody, and Tonks.

"Apart from a great many cruciatus curses, several other pain curses, an imperius curse or two, a few bone breaking spells, some healing spells, and an eclectic mix of mind-invasion spells?" Moody asked, handing over a paper of what he'd learned from the examination he'd just finished. "I'd guess a lot of other mind-reading stuff. He's healthy enough – someone applied some healing spells. But I don't know about his mind."

"You said you had found another one, a vampire?" Remus asked, "did he say anything?"

"No. His mind was mostly gone. He was just a teenager who thought being a vampire would be cool and get him a lot of girls. Found some vampire who was trying to build himself a small following and got turned in return for an eternity as part of their "coven"." Rahkesh replied, not hiding his disgust. "When the vampire Lords began exterminating illegal vampires he turned to Voldemort. And got several years of servitude and torture, then eventually being tortured nearly insane when he failed a mission. I killed him before bringing Snape over."

"What a waste." McGonagal said.

"He made a decision without thinking that it might be forever, and with doing any real research on what it meant." Moody said, "dumbass got what was coming at him. Changing species while dying is something you can only do once."

"What do we do if he was actually loyal to Voldemort?" Shacklebolt asked.

"Kill him, not loss. Better for both him and us than if the demons get him." Moody said.

"Alastor!"

"I;ll handle it Minerva." Moody said sharply, McGonagal scowled furiously.

"Shacklebolt, if he was working for Dumbledore can you get the Ministry to let him be?" Remus asked.

"Not a problem." Shacklebotl assured them. "They'll probably try to give him an award or some such, but it won't be hard to convince them. If they do get difficult he can always testify under a truth potion. But I don't think they'll cause trouble, especially if a few remaining Order of the Pheonix members testify for him."

"Should we be using a truth spell or some such?" Tonks asked.

"No. First he can probably beat truth spells, and probably most or all truth potions. Second even though he's fairly healthy those things mess with your mind to force truthfulness, and he might not handle that well at all after having his mind put through a meat grinder by Voldemort." Harry said.

"Should he be awake by now?" Tonks asked. Bringing everyone's attention back to Snape.

"No, sleep spell." Harry said. "Should I?"

"Yes Mr. Potter." McGonagal said.

"Just Harry thanks." Harry said, and pulled the sleep spell off wandlessly. Moody and Remus both noted his lack of a wand, the others were focused on Snape. For several long minutes they just watched, and waited. Fidgeting started, Tonks twirling her wand and McGonagal began pacing while Kingsley began tapping his fingers on the table he was leaning against. Harry caught the exact moment Snape woke only because Sygra, well concealed atop a bookcase and disguised as a Black Mamba, hissed at him. But Snape gave no sign of having woken, not a muscle twitched, his breathing didn't even change. Despite himself Harry was impressed, the man had been out for a long time, and before that probably tortured, but now that he was awake he was giving no sign of it, instead studying his surroundings as best he could.

"Minerva, stop pacing, Kingsley, quit that before I curse you." Snape finally rasped, eyes opening before he was done speaking. Harry just shook his head, amused, still the same old Snape apparently.

"Severus." McGonagal sighed, relieved. "How do you feel?"

"How do you think I feel?"

"Like you've been in a dungeon being tortured for a few weeks?" Remus suggested. Snape groaned.

"You dragged in the wolf too? And who else?" He sat up slowly, wincing several times. "Oh just great." He sneered as he sighted Tonks and Moody. Tonks hair turned electric blue.

"Could be a little grateful."

"For?"

"Getting you out of there. Once Voldemort died everyone was just inclined to bury the whole fortress and leave it. If Harry hadn't suspected you were alive down there…" Moody said, trailing off and fully giving credit to Harry. Harry wanted to hit him, great, now they'd _never_ get anything out of Snape. Not in a million years, not after being told that _Harry Potter_ had saved him.

"He's dead." Snape breathed, surprising Harry. "He's really dead?"

"Yes. Very, very dead." McGonagal said. Snape's eyes flickered shut and he relaxed visibly before opening them again and pulling up the sleeve of the new robes McGonagal had brought for him. Harry leaned forward, he hadn't thought what would happen to the mark.

Where the dark mark had been was a white scar in the same shape the tattoo had held Snape for decades. But the mark was fully gone. Harry breathed out a slow gasp of relief at seeing that. He hadn't checked before when Snape was asleep, and he should have. That mark had been partly created with parselmagic, it had not been impossible for the link to transfer to Harry. And he hadn't even thought of that until Snape moved to check. Dumb, real dumb. He was lucky that whatever Voldemort had done hadn't acted that way. Harry mentally berated himself for not thinking of that possibility before as the surge of panic that had accompanied Snape's move vanished.

"By the fact that I am not dead nor, apparently, in a prison, I can assume Albus's portrait must have told all of you what our plan was?" Snape said.

"No." McGonagal said. "That damn portrait just twinkles at me and says I should ask you."

"Ah." Snape's eyes flickered around again warily. "And just where is that portrait?"

"We're at one of my safe houses." Harry volunteered softly, deliberately avoiding everyone's eyes as he re-wrapped the bandage he had on his right hand. He had soaked the skin in a magical potion that the Akren Healers had provided because they wanted a report on how he reacted. It would also temporarily stop the pain the injured caused, so Rahkesh had decided it was an equitable trade.

"Albus's portrait is…stuck…to the wall at Hogwarts." McGonagal said slowly with a slight grimace. Snape sneered in his typical style, but Harry thought he caught a flicker of amusement. Strange, he'd never caught on to anything like that from Snape before…but maybe that was just him being oblivious. He leaned in to listen, finally, finally, after more than a year, maybe now he would know what had actually happened the night his old headmaster had died. Not that it matter too much, as removed from Harry Potter as he now was, but that didn't fully stop the hurt, the wanting to know.

"Well that's about as much as I might have expected." Snape muttered. "Very well. Albus was dying. A very painful drawn-out death. When Draco Malfoy couldn't kill him he knew that the boy would be pressured into it, and would fail, and would probably be killed for the failure. So he asked me to. I had already sworn a vow to protect Draco, so that fit just fine. So I killed him. I used my vow to protect Draco to give me the strength to manage it. A better death than he was ever going to get. The curse that had gotten him was unstoppable, and it was eating him alive." Snape's crisp factual account felt strange, like he was reporting just events. But that was Snape. He wasn't about to explain or to show anything else. Least of all any feelings. In fact the clipped tone, more than anything else, told Harry how much he regretted Dumbledore's death.

Snape's eyes were fixed on his mark-less arm while he waited for a reaction. A strange almost half-smile flickering over his face before being hidden again and again. Then he looked up abruptly.

"What happened to Draco?"

"He got into some trouble." Moody said as Harry gave him a slight telepathic nudge, ignoring the flash of pain in his hand from it. "He observed Voldemort working on his little plan with the demons. Voldemort began using him as a test subject for training newbies in curse use. Eventually Draco escaped, Melrin knows how, only to run right into a hunting vampire, who decided to save him from Voldemort's hunters, only to turn him into her slave. Not legal by any means but no one spoke up much."

Snape actually looked horrified, McGonagal, now sitting in the chair beside the bed, took his hand.

"Anyhow, this vampire, Mariah, is the premier dragon researcher. A little obsessive if you ask me. But she's done well by Draco, helped him recover from what he'd gone through and got him fully functional again. I saw him with her recently when he needed to testify to the MLFC. He looked just fine." Moody said.

"Fine. As a slave." Snape slowly said, a furious snarl beginning.

"Not the best place for anyone true. But it won't be for long." Moody said. Harry glanced over quickly in surprise, he hadn't heard anything. "The decision to divide up and let each species decide who gets a place in the shelters means that all humans slaves need to be freed, because the Conclave leader, Mrs. Stocklir, insisted on considering them as well. You know about her?" Snape nodded. "Well she got the Vampire Lord to agree, and the others aren't so much as breathing at the wrong time now, because he's the one choosing which vampires live. So they're freeing all their human slaves. Even the ones that were willing to become slaves."

"And Lucius Malfoy?"

"Dead." Moody said, again surprising Rahkesh. "He too managed to get himself enslaved by a vampire. A thoroughly nasty character. I can just about guarantee that his last months were bloody awful. But he got into some sort of trouble, so now he's dead."

"Ah." Snape said, sounding very pleased indeed. Harry wondered if maybe he'd missed something, he'd always thought Snape and the elder Malfoy got along at least _almost_ well. "And Draco got left with the whole fortune? What about Narcissa?"

"Also dead, disappeared then turned up dead months later." Moody lied cleanly. Harry felt a little relieved at that. No one needed to know about him using her to kill a horcrux. The only ones who needed to know already knew, and he could trust them not to say a word. Well for the next thousand years or so.

"When did Voldemort imprison you?" Remus asked.

"Not long ago. I tricked one of the others into botching a potion that would have been used to force people's minds accept the dark mark. I didn't think of Voldemort blaming me for their failure, but since I was the head of the lab it was my fault. The other poor bastard was burned alive." Snape said. He was starting to look tired. "I got a warning, not a friendly one, from another death eater, about how much they'd enjoy torturing me. So I ran for it after one of the meetings. Voldemort's followers were deserting constantly then, with so many he couldn't catch us all. I managed to hide until a week ago."

"We're working things out with what remains of the Ministry. I bet we can get Albus's portrait to talk now that you're safe. And it shouldn't be too hard to get the Ministry to let you alone, you were in one of Voldemort's dungeons." McGonagal said. "I expect they're too busy to care anymore anyway."

"You've been keeping up on the demon invasion?" Moody asked.

"Yes. I did manage to get that welcome news." Snape growled. "Is Britain building a shelter?"

"No." McGonagal said, "not enough people to get anything done."

"Just great. I think I'll go see if any of the ones being built need help." Snape sighed.

"And why would they want your help?" Moody asked.

"I _am_ a dark magic and potion expert. I am certain even you can figure out how that may be useful in preparing defenses." Snape drawled.

"Somehow I don't think you're in any kind of shape to be going anywhere." Tonks said slowly.

"You're welcome to stay here as long as you like." Harry said softly. "I just keep the house as convenient meeting place. It's comfortable, well stocked and well warded but no one's spent more than a few hours here in decades. Madam Pomfrey suggested a few days rest before you try wandering around any." He wasn't expecting any gratitude from Snape.

"Thank you Potter." Snape sighed, nodding, shocking everyone speechless.

XXX

Rahkesh pulled himself out his meditation slowly, retaking control of his completely relaxed body. He was lying flat on his back on his bed, and Sygra was hissing from her coiled post on top of his pillow.

_Sharahak is here._

Rahkesh twitched his fingers, then toes, the feeling of the magic he had been focused on fading quickly. His bloodmagic felt much better, but his right hand throbbed painfully. In a deep meditative state he hadn't felt it really, waking the pain hit him like a punch. He slowly sat up, magic was shimmering across his skin, like little waves of lightning. Rahkesh pulled it back in and felt his magical flows even out and shift. The knot of magic in his right hand eased a little, and his fingernails started hurting and throbbing in time with the lightning-like scars that wrapped around his wrist and hand.

He was starting to think that the phoenix feather that had been turned into pure magic and blasted into him was not causing him much damage at all. When examining the wound he had instead felt a powerful protective/healing presence there. He would need to discuss it with Namach and maybe a few of the healers, but it almost felt like the remnants of the pheonix feather was taking a little of his magic, which was flowing easily through it, and altering it so that it had greater healing magic, minor, very minor, but he could feel it, and life magic. It was an interesting counter to all the death magic he'd been through lately. However it was the pheonix feather remnant that was causing some of the pain he was feeling. Perhpas that would be the trade off, a stronger connection to life, and having a small amount of his magic constantly altered into healing energy directed at life, in exchange for which he woul always feel some pain when doing wand-based magic. He needed to dicuss that with someone who actually knew about such things, but his instincts were saying that it made sense, and that he was right, and Rahkesh always trusted his instincts.

"Come in." He called, standing and wandlessly dropping the spells on his door. He had not been monitoring the charms while meditating, relying on Sygra to catch anyone entering.

Sharahak walked in a moment later. Moving on all fours, a demon's natural state, he walked with a cat-like stalk, horned scaled head as high as Rahkesh's chest. Massive wings making him look much larger. Rahkesh had only fire lighting his room at the moment, a vast array of torches – he found magical lighting to be an issue at the moment and of course muggle light bulbs couldn't handle magic close to them. Sharahak's cream and grey scales and leathery skin gleamed a warm color in fire light. He looked considerably more alert and healthy than when he'd returned from the demon realm.

Rahkesh didn't ask how Sharahak had gotten into Akren. As Earth's demon/vampire ally he basically had freedom to go anywhere, especially with Namach vouching for him. The Headmistress had probably not complained when he asked to visit Rahkesh. Nor had she warned Rahkesh.

"How's the Conclave treating you?" Rahkesh asked, wandlessly transfiguring a couch so that the back disappeared – Sharahak's wings tended to get in the way of most customary modern furniture.

"Just fine." Sharahak said. "I didn't realize how much I actually knew about demons. The questions keep bringing up information I didn't really know I knew. Does that sound odd?"

"Not really. You're trying to describe something you've lived with for a thousand years, things obvious or so normal as to seem invisible are valuable information to anyone who has never been there."

"And even if I was a recluse I still read the newspapers…though they don't call them that." Sharahak agreed.

"Is the translating difficult?"

"Yes. I think of things in the words the demons used, but have to find equivalents to compare them too." Sharahak said.

"You've been staying with Namach?" Rahkesh asked. Sharahak had become very loyal indeed and rarely seemed far from the Vampire Lord's side. Sharahak was more follower than leader, now that he couldn't live as independently as he once had. But even if he did form some sort of agreement with Namach the older vampire wasn't likely to demand much of him. Probably Sharahak's best option at the moment.

"For the moment. I recovered most of the things I had stashed away around the world. I have bought a small place of my own in India. However Tristan has been helping me adjust. And I am considering possibly joining his forces in a slightly more permanent way sometime." Sharahak said, vaugely. Vampiric loyalties were not something to be discussed with a mortal, even one he trusted completely. Even if he was now a demon some part of Sharahak would always be vampire, and Rahkesh knew he preferred his vampiric side and tended to stick with that personality, even if he'd been a demon far longer than he'd been a vampire. Rahkesh didn't mind, he never understood vampires' arrangements with each other anyway and didn't really care either. "But not like the rest of them – being linked to you I could never be loyal only to him so that's not possible." Sharahak glanced over and locked eyes with Rahkesh, "which brings me to the point of my visit; are you quite all right Rahkesh?"

"No." Rahkesh said, sitting down and explaining his most recent bout of life-endangering magical damage. Sharahak listened patiently while he described what had happened and how it was messing up his magic now. Rahkesh ended by asking "how did you know something was wrong?"

"The magical bond we share is not terribly strong." Sharahak replied, "but I can tell it's there, and I have been sensing a lot of danger and pain from you. It's not something I really feel unless I try. Instead I get an urge to check – since you saved my life the bond is oriented towards returning that and protecting you. I normally get nothing at all, even during your more brutal sparring sessions. When you got into that fight with the young elves I didn't sense a thing. The last few days I've got this itch telling me you're in trouble."

"Sorry, I'll do my best to block off that link. I get into so much trouble that no one can really help with. I'll close the link off unless I actually _need _help. Though even when that happens…no offense but I'm not so sure anyone could help me much some of the time." Rahkesh said, a little embarrassed. Sharahak laughed.

"Yes, Tristan has been telling me all about your continuous run of extreme circumstances." Sharahak said, "he finds it vastly entertaining, when he isn't annoyed enough to kick you for it. I get the impression it's a little wearing for your Professors."

"They teach at Akren." Rahkesh stated dryly.

"Yes, and so they also enjoy the challenge you present far too much to ever complain." Sharahak agreed.

"I try." Rahkesh grinned. He stood and walked over to one of his trunks, one containing weapons. From it he withdrew the remains of his shattered staff, the one that had been made for him by his Chachapoyaro friends.

"This was shattered in a battle not too long after I got back here." Rahkesh said, "I haven't been able to fix it. Do you know if it is possible to fix?"

Sharahak took the pieces and examined them silently. Turning them about and tracing the broken edges with one claw. Sparks flew off of one broken edge as he tested its magic.

"Yes…yes I think I can fix this." He finally said slowly. "They were made to be reparable. Xuelhuala tricks. I'll give it a try." Sharahak promised, he slid the broken pieces back behind one wing, into the pocket between his wings where they joined his body. "That must have been some fight."

"Yeah." Rahkesh said. "Sharahak…do you think it would be worthwhile to contact the Chachapoyaro – we're the only ones that know about them. No one has warned them about the demons, and they haven't been in contact with the world, else they would have been at the Conclave."

Sharahak considered that for a few long moments. "Yes, they need to be warned, but Rahkesh do you think they still exist?"

"Yes, I think they're still around. Hidden away from the world." Rahkesh said. Not mentioning Nicodemus's letter. Sharahak's eyes flickered over to the painting anyway as he nodded.

"Warn them then, but be careful, if they're so well hidden they won't take well to visitors."

As Sharahak left Rahkesh rose and walked over to the small table beside his bed. Sitting on the table was a single picture, a painting in a wooden frame. Sygra, Nicodemus, and himself, smiling and relaxed against a jungle mountainside, and Nicodemus's letter came back to him. _My people are safe enough. We have removed them to a place outside the world. I do not fear for their safety. All signs point to a remarkably peaceful future. But I fear for you Rahkesh, I fear for what will happen to the rest of the world. _

He had a decision to make. One that he didn't think he had the right to make. If the Chachapoyaro were indeed safe and hidden away, yes he needed to warn them…but to drag their sleeping army out of hiding? To force the hidden society into the light of the rest of the world? Chachapoyaro civilization was very different from anything else. Much of the way they lived would either horrify or at least shock the rest of the world – in their society you needed permission to have children and as a result mild eugenics was a way of life. Rahkesh liked them; he'd found them to be intelligent and happy contented people with almost no strife or crime at all. Very, very advanced at just about everything.

Something tugged at the edge of his vision, pulling on his mind uncomfortably. Rahkesh followed, knowing what he would see.

Screams, intense breathless endless screaming. Rahkesh snarled and the thunderbird rocked and woke, ready to fight. The screaming was getting louder, and Rahkesh could hear the beat of wings. Fire raced across his vision and black smoke wafted through his nostrils. It hurt, the death stink on the hot air. Charred flesh and boiling blood.

A cobblestone street emerged, rivers of red blood running down the gutters, blood splashed across empty doorways and shattered windows. The homes were abandoned, a ghost town dripping blood from windowsills and gaping holes in burning rooftops. Blood on the tree trunks, blood smeared on doors and running down front steps, dripping from gutters and turning street-side flowerbeds into red squishy marshes. Bits of flesh, skin and intestines, were smeared over hedges and hung off railings. Claw marks raked down the sides of the buildings, huge gouges through the wood and stone. A human arm lay, detached from its owner, carelessly flung upon a staircase.

People were screaming, individuals now, shrieks of terror and the moans of the dying. He loved this, the blood, the rich stink of fear, bloodlust raced through his veins and he roared, calling his flock to another kill. Wait…he didn't like this…why was he feeling this way? These were not his feelings. He was watching through another person's emotions and eyes? That would involve a real connection…was he feeling these things from the magic surrounding him then?

The sky was red, red with fire and fear, and the flames reflected off the underside of the black clouds of smoke. The blood tasted good, smelled good too, he wanted more of it. No he didn't, the others did. Rahkesh fought to untangle his mind from what he was sensing, but collapsed under the overwhelming emotions and blood thirst, the drive to destroy and conquer that was so thick he felt like he was drowning in an ocean of war. Wings beat through the air and shrieks of triumph sounded overhead. Magic lashed out; flowing through the streets, the remaining windows shattered and the screams were engulfed in magic. Then they went silent.

Rahkesh blinked hard, swaying on his feet. His vision returned only to find Nicodemus's burning bright eyes watching him from the painting. Rahkesh drew a shaky breath. _The other Generals and I are agreed that if the demons do invade then it is in our best interest to stand with the rest of the world against them. If everyone else falls, then we cannot hope to fight alone. And so when the demons do break free of their realm we will fight with the world, and hope that our joined forces are enough. _

_If the day ever arises when there is no hope of stopping them, and when whatever fighting forces exist in your time are not enough to withstand the demon invasion, then summon the Xuelhuala. Our sleeping army lies in an ancient city hidden far from the world in both space and magic. To reach them seek the ancient underground river which flows beneath where the Urubamba and the Utcubamba rivers join. Follow the waters of either one until you reach the point where they join the waters of the other. You can reach it magically by drawing the Xuelhuala insignia on the water's surface. Do be careful, it is a bit of a rough trip. The cave of red diamonds. _

_The living descendants of my people, assuming they exist still, have only one connection to the world. On the new moon seek the Vilcabamba river, where it joins the Urubamba there is an underwater cavern. I know these locations are different from where we were when you visited. We are outside normal space and so location of the gateways matters little._

Rahkesh turned and went to pack, stopping he turned back, and took the painting from its place on the table. Before he did anything, he had one more letter left to read. The one behind the first one, the one he hadn't read yet, not wanting to remember his lost friends. But now he had to know. Nicodemus, a full General of the Xuelhuala, had chosen to put the future of his entire civilization in Rahkesh hands. He and Rahkesh had known each other for barely a year, yet Nicodemus had left to him the safety of his people, and the secret to finding them.

_Sygra._ Rahkesh called to wake his familiar. _We're going back to visit the Chachapoyaro. _

It would take a few days, and he had the time, the next new moon was five days away. He needed to prepare, and to write up a few letters to warn some people. Mrs. Stocklir for one. Nicodemus had entrusted him with the safety of his people, and Rahkesh could not let the demon invasion come without warning them. He at least owed Nicodemus that. And, perhaps, just perhaps, Nicodemus was still alive.

-

-

Okay, a lot going on I know. I'm impressed with anyone who manages to follow every plotline.

Just as a heads-up to everyone reading this fic; I will end this fic with the solution to getting away from the demons, just before the demons invade, and start the next fic one with the invasion. That fic will be all war, and some other really awesome stuff. This fic probably has less than six more chapters, but no promises, might be ten, might be two. I will _try _to warn you at least one chapter in advance of ending it.

Please review!


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Hey all! Sorry about the long wait, I took a vacation. Then had writers block for three weeks. On another note I'm having a hard time finding time to write at the moment, which is depressing because I have too many plans and ideas. However now that I'm back and getting started again maybe my schedule will clear up.

Chapter 24

Rahkesh strode through Akren's stone halls, mind soaring ahead, seeking out the tiny blips of energy that were the Akren designators every student wore. These all said the same thing, but they were also just a little unique. Students were trained to recognize the tiny identifiers before the end of their first year. This little bit of mind magic was more a concentration on wandless magic than anything else, and he wasn't feeling any pain from it. Rahkesh located Daray in a room next to the entrance of the massive library wing, along with a full dozen other vampires and two mortals.

Shouting echoed from the room when he got there, though he could not make out the words. The door was open so Rahkesh slipped into the room silently. A vampire and a human were standing in the middle of a circle of now silent watchers, glaring at each other.

Daray was standing on the other side of the room, by the other door. He had found a spot the sunlight from the large windows didn't quite hit. While his friend looked relaxed, standing straight, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders relaxed, Rahkesh noted that he was also about ready to jump in if a fight started. Just wonderful, and here the students had almost managed to go a whole week without any private violent spats. Everyone was too exhausted from the battle training. Apparently the unheard-of calm was over.

Rahkesh made his way around the room as the human, a young woman he'd never met, and the vampire, a taller woman he'd also never met, began to circle. A vampire got in his face about halfway around, growling softly.

"Come to help her out Thunder?" He asked. Rahkesh gave him a bored look.

"What's the squabbling about?"

"Conflict over the species ratio in the shelters. There will be a lot of humans, very few vampires. It does not take any real genius to guess that the humans, fae, and werewolves might take this chance to rid the world of us."

"Prey general look forward to fewer predators." Rahkesh replied dryly, "except that being completely out numbered no one can afford to even think about killing off any capable fighter, regardless of species. And," he added, gesturing to the two fighters, "they're both from Akren. Not much chance of getting rid of our vampires, unfortunately the lot of you are tougher to kill than cockroaches."

The other human in the room chuckled, Rahkesh shouldered past the vampire who had confronted him and walked up beside Daray.

"While our imbecilic fellows wear each other out _we _can surely find something more productive to be doing." Rahkesh said, effectively stopping the two fighters and drawing everyone's attention. He clapped Daray on the shoulder and turned for the exit door, as he did Rahkesh let out a soft curse in Chachapoyan, the effective translation of which was "dumb fucks".

The door opened just as soon as it clicked shut behind him, Daray having gotten to it and opened it in less than a heartbeat.

"I've not heard that language from anyone but Sharahak since last midwinter." Daray said, falling into step beside Rahkesh, not asking where they were going.

"Feel like a trip to South America?" Rahkesh asked as they approached an intersection in the hallways. It didn't take Daray half a second to grasp that Rahkesh was going to find the Chachapoyaro and warn them of the demons and bring their hidden civilization back to the world. He didn't even ask if Rahkesh was certain they still existed, or how he was going to find them, he didn't need to ask to know the answer to both questions. Daray was no fool; Nicodemus's letter to Rahkesh had clearly had a lot more to it that "hi, how are you?"

"When?" More than one question.

"Now." And an answer to both questions.

"An hour and a half to pack personal stuff. A few days to gather some extra supplies like potions, it'll be that long until the wards upgrades are finished anyway, and at least a day and half to get there." Daray said, quickly thinking through their preparations. "I'll find Silas. You get permission." Daray said, spinning down the right hand hall without a second's hesitation in a blur of dark hair and black cloak.

Rahkesh grinned as he made his way towards the headmistress's office, once again relieved that he'd found Akren and enrolled. He _really_ liked his Akren friends sometimes.

-

Headmistress Nvara Aelfly was not overly surprised to see her only student thunderbird. Rahkesh had been hopping in and out of the Akren Mountains so much it was a wonder he wasn't too dizzy to walk. His imitation of a Ping-Pong ball had originally caused a little concern, but the school didn't interfere in student's lives much. She had expected he'd be asking to leave before the final piece of the wards was reset, though she hoped he'd taken some of the enforced stay to heal and relax a little. He was just about to fall apart given his record of injuries lately. Akren _had_ had students who got into more trouble than Rahkesh did, but not very many of them. And Rahkesh's constant fights and need to be away from the school was far more legitimate than the student six years previous who'd been running a muggle prostitution ring.

"- I owe it to them to warn them about the demons. If they're anything like what they were a thousand years ago, unlikely I know, then we'll have a massive very well trained fighting force ready to help against the demons. If I can bring back their sleeping army it'll double or triple the number of fully trained and experienced fighters we have." Rahkesh was explaining. Nvara was listening with one tiger-claw pierced ear and one sharp eye. The other half watched several messages appearing in a continuous stream in the small set of folders on her desk. Reports from the alumni association on the readiness of each division of alumni – they were sort of competing to see who could ready the best attack plans the fastest. She would have let Rahkesh go anyway; having decided long since that their slightly-crazy thunderbird was trustworthy. But this business about this army sleeping in time…

"These Xuelhuala, they must have been some amazing fighters."

"Certainly up to our standards, which is more than the rest of the world can say." Rahkesh replied. _Our standards_ of course meant _Akren's_ standards. Which were awfully hard to reach. But the Xuelhuala even when he'd known them had been around a lot longer than Akren had, and they were obsessive about being the best out there.

"Very well, enjoy the trip. And do come back alive will you? And for goodness sake bring those two vampires back alive, I'd not like to deal with Cyala Ateres temper if either of them dies." Nvara said. Cyala might just go solve the demon problem on her own if she got that angry. Nvara was not privy to all the ancient mercenary matriarch's secrets, but she knew a good deal more than most vampires did.

"Unlikely, we do know these people."

"You knew them then." Nvara replied coldly. He was, she noted, wearing the Akren crest on his left shoulder and had it faintly embroidered onto the outside of each boot. The threads had shielding magic to deflect spells and damage to the boots. Not Rahkesh's work, but Rianae's. The threadmagic classes had all focused on war preparations, defensive or offensive magic that could be used by individuals. In two weeks the Akren alumni and students would be carrying so much threadmagic in their clothes the demons might very well gag enough to vomit, should they actually manage to bite anyone.

Rahkesh was also wearing the Akren crest on the back on each of the gloves tucked into his belt. Good, Nvara had read the letter that Marvin Gale had dispatched to all alumni and students. For all of its history Akren had trained anyone capable of learning in any magical art imaginable, and invented a few new ones along the way. They kept libraries for their graduates, safe houses, conference halls, and held advanced classes, but never before had they mobilized this way. Their policy had always been to teach, but not to interfere except in the most extreme cases. Never had all graduates of Akren been ordered home to form an army. Not for any war fought in all the centuries Akren had existed. But this was a different matter; these were, quite simply, aliens, and enemies to all. In any previous war alumni might have taken sides against each other. Not for this one. And so everyone was proudly displaying their allegiance to Akren. This included alumni who had previously kept their schooling a secret from all of their business associates, friend, and even spouses. And _those_ revelations had caused more than a little upheaval, especially politically. Akren-trained politicians didn't usually advertise their training until after being elected, if then. Now they all were. And she wanted every student clearly marked. Especially this one. Rahkesh was Akren's latest star, and that was something that all of the alumni were rather smug about, every time his name wound up in the papers.

"Tell me Rahkesh, what was the English language a thousand years ago?"

"Very different?"

"Unrecognizable. It didn't exist in any form we'd be able to hear. The difference between then and now is such that no communication would be possible. A thousand years can change a lot. At the very least do not expect to be able to communicate at all with these people. And remember that the way they spoke so long ago, may no longer be considered proper, even if the language some how miraculously hasn't changed."

"Silas thought of that." Rahkesh said, having received the telepathic message a few minutes previously. "He's bringing language potions."

"All right." Or the little hypnotist would just entrance the lot of them.

"Given just what the Chachapoyaro are I'll have to notify Mrs. Stocklir and-"

"No need. I'll do it. I'm meeting with the Conclave in an hour anyway." Nvara said. "We're having issues. Many of the muggle vampires and werewolves have gone into hiding. The magical vampires and werewolves are planning to kill them off. The magical ones will fight to the death and then suicide, but the muggle ones are more of a liability, so they're being killed. Given that virtually all of the worlds' best assassins and mercenaries are Akren trained the Alumni Association and I will have to contact them to start the hunt." She paused, then grinned slyly, "and I can't wait to see Tristan's reaction to having a massive new army suddenly appear."

-

Vladimir Konovalov, City Master of Moscow and Lord of the Russian vampires was having a particularly bad day. And it was only going to get worse.

First came a call from his chief of security, Lady Valerie Satyeva, informing him that, with absolutely no warning, the City Master of Chelyabinsk had been killed. His death had come in a fairly spectacular manner during a dominance challenge from his highest ranking subordinate. Challenges for territory (cities usually) were not uncommon. The country had a lot of cities and any place with a population of more than a hundred thousand or so muggles would have its own vampiric ruler. In most cases cities that were geographically close would be in one territory or there would be one of the City Masters who out ranked the others and therefore had some (limited) authority. In Russia, however, Vladimir Konovalov was the undisputed ruler of his country. Each city had its own City Master, and these generally got their positions independent of Konovalov. In cases where cities were close one vampire would be the locally dominant City Master. And these, in turn, all deferred to Konovalov.

Anyone could challenge a City Master, and if successful in throwing them out or killing them, could claim the position. Challenges were not always one-on-one; guards and followers took care of most of them. An attempt on the City Master could really only come from a vampire who had a following large enough to match what the reigning City Master had. That was when City Masters had to fight for their lives. In this case the challenger had recruited new vampires and a good many of her former master's. She had won the challenge and was taking over as City Master. However she was still in Russia, and Russia belonged to Vladimir Konovalov, and he had certain rules for the other City Masters in the country. He, in turn, knew very well that the City Masters were still very much independent, and pushing them too far would lead to a general revolt. While he wanted to avoid that he was far enough above the others that he could force them to do a great deal. One of his major rules was that if someone wanted to challenge the City Master of any city, they had to notify Konovalov in advance. They didn't have to tell the vampire they were going to attack, just Konovalov. Satyeva's call had been a very unpleasant surprise. It had been nearly two hundred years since someone had ignored that rule, and the last time the vampire in question had challenged Konovalov within a decade of taking over his first City.

Satyeva knew the new City Master – there were more very powerful male vampires than females ones, a holdover from earlier times and different customs. It took many centuries to get to the point where you could attempt to gain the followers and power necessary to rule a city. And until the last century there had been more male vampires created than female ones, and a great dislike of overly strong females, a carryover from the mortal human society. And so the few really powerful females knew each other. Satyeva was of the opinion that Chelyabinsk's new City Master had not deliberately neglected to inform Konovalov of her plans. More likely she had been forced to attack before she had planned to, possibly because the former City Master had discovered her plans.

Konovalov would have to meet with the new city Master within one week of the fight. He was not looking forward to it. It would have to involve a brutal duel, with a great deal of excessive blood loss, to make sure that he was, in fact, still the most powerful vampire in Russia. This process was necessary to show everyone he was still in charge, and to prevent any discontented vampires from thinking that the new City Master had bigger ambitions than just Chelyabinsk. It was also necessary to make the new ruler aware that she was not getting any higher on the vampiric hierarchy by attacking him. Her ranking amongst the City Masters closest to her would be determined by fights with them, and how thoroughly he managed to defeat her. Konovalov had other things he would rather do with his time.

The second message came from the middle of Siberia. Only a few vampires lived there, loners for the most part who liked the cold and the remoteness. A lack of human prey and a very active fae community and werewolf presence had led to Konovalov meeting each individual that lived there, so that he could approve of their continued existence in his territory personally. Meaning, naturally, he had drunk their blood and at the same time examined their magic and minds to see if they might cause trouble for him. The message had been an urgent one, sent by courier from the most powerful vampire in Siberia, who, despite his rank, only had eight subordinate vampires allied with him. That he had sent one with the message was worrying. More so was the actual message; there were muggle werewolves living in Siberia, a lot of them. Too many. They were creating more at rapid pace and the muggles were starting to notice. The leader claimed he was building an army to fight the demons. He also claimed to be a prophet of sorts, a living representation of the collective Will of the Lycanthropic Magic. Konovalov definitely did not need to deal with that sort of thing right now. He had notified the alpha werewolf of Moscow's largest pack, who was also Russia's Chief Werewolf. But he suspected that his help would be needed in cleaning up this mess. Maybe he would send Satyeva; she liked werewolf blood more than he did.

The third problem was a muggle reporter who had stumbled into a vampire-owned nightclub and photographed some exceedingly dumb young vampire feeding from a muggle. Fangs and all. He (the vampire) was being held in Konovalov's prison at the moment. Konovalov had already decided to kill him. But he also needed to deal with the owner of the establishment, who in turn needed to deal with his four guards, who were supposed to read minds and use magic to ensure that such things didn't happen. Konovalov could not decide what to order done there. There were some interesting circumstances under which the reporter had slipped cameras past the guards. The file was two inches thick. A lot of paper. The vampire owner of the club had better have included one very good summary, or Konovalov was going to have to reconsider recommending him for a slot in one of the shelters.

The forth problem of the night was that a vampire in St. Petersburg had gotten her hands on some muggle technology, and filmed herself actually _turning a muggle into a vampire_! She had sent the video out onto the _internet_. She had other videos of herself, telling the muggles all about vampires and their glory. She already had five magical vampire followers (all female), and seemed to be trying to form some sort of cult. She was fifteen. Konovalov had her in his cells as well. And so his vampires had spent eleven hours removing all trace of those videos from the internet. Since she had uploaded all of them at once it had been easy to track who had copied them. His team was very well educated and trained, and had hacked into seventeen personal computers belonging to muggles and removed their copies of the video. Getting their physical addresses the machines had been destroyed, and the muggles minds read, to determine if they had stored the files elsewhere. They had also determined who had watched the videos. These people had almost all been tracked down and had their memories modified. There were still a few left, but only a few. The new muggle vampire had been disposed of. The magical vampire responsible would be burned alive, her followers got to watch, and then they too would be executed. Stakes through the heart or decapitation, their choice.

Konovalov knew perfectly well that killing a fifteen year old girl and five others under the age of eighteen would get an adverse reaction from most magical humans. But in Russia there was an understanding that vampires lived by vampiric laws. That wasn't the real problem. The problem was that all of the children had been turned at their present ages. Therefore they would not age, remaining teenagers forever. In his territory it was illegal, punishable by death, to turn any human into vampire if they were under twenty-five. Konovalov had not known of their existence. He had determined who had created them. That vampire, a male of ninety-one, turned at thirty, was also in the cells. Konovalov just hoped that no one found out that the reason there had been so many vampires under twenty was because they had formerly been the girls in the brothel this male vampire ran. _He_, of course, would also be burned alive. Konovalov might have felt pity for the girls, but upon reading their minds he learned that not only they asked to be turned, they had also been informed of all of the vampiric laws, including the illegality of their own existence.

His final problem of the night (he hoped) was that the Master of Uzbekistan had contacted him to say that a group of vampires had appeared in his territory (unknown origin). A spy had been sent to determine who they were. There were six hundred of them (very bad), all magical (even worse), and they planned to contact the demons and offer them help at getting werewolf prisoners in return for being allowed to live and remain free (shockingly horrifying). He had asked Konovalov to contact his own Master, Tristan Namach, with the news. Konovalov had cursed out the less powerful vampire in every language he knew (fourteen) loudly enough – telepathically – that the other had wound up with blood flowing out his ears. The coward should have contacted Tristan himself, but Konovalov, before knocking the sorry waste of space unconscious, had agreed to do it himself. If only to ensure that Tristan would understand when he personally murdered Uzbekistan's master in as horrific a fashion as he could manage. For the Master of Uzbekistan to ask another vampire to pass on such awful news about happenings in his territory was the worst cowardice Konovalov had _ever_ encountered, and he was going to make sure every vampire on Earth knew about it and then kill the wretched fool. That kind of cowardice had no place among vampires. That, in itself, was not the problem. The problem was that he now had to make his report to Tristan.

Tristan Namach had been working continuously for the past five months. Vladimir knew that his former master had not taken so much as an hour to rest. Frequently he had golems working as well, draining him further. The sun called the vampires into their death sleep every day, but the strong-willed could ignore the exhaustion that came with daylight. However vampires did require rest, and to go without for too long could have truly devastating consequences. Tristan was well away from that, it would take another three or four months before he started showing any serious effects. But he had been worn out to the point that he was starting to feel the death sleep's call, which he usually didn't notice at all. And so Tristan had taken off for a day and half the night to rest. Unfortunately for Vladimir he had not yet awakened from his deep death-like slumber.

Vladimir had been checking the link that connected him to his master every ten minutes for nearly an hour. The problem brewing in Uzbekistan was enough that something needed to be done within the next two days. If he waited longer than an hour to report it Tristan would probably be furious. Waking him from the only few hours of rest he'd had the time to get in five months could also have painful consequences. Vladimir cursed the Master of Uzbekistan again.

Walking into a lavish sitting room Vladimir glanced over at the six guards who followed him everywhere. When four would have slipped away to stand outside the doors he waved them in.

"I'll be speaking directly to Tristan Namach, and I expect it will not be a pleasant encounter." Vladimir said with a heavy sigh, finding a soft coach and stretching out on his back. His guards, having been with him for nearly eight hundred years, knew that this meant he'd probably be temporarily incapable of sensing anything around him, or protecting himself, and so formed up around him, but several feet away to avoid stray magic, or irking the King (unofficial) of their species with their presence. Vladimir put the restorative and healing potions he always carried on a coffee table next to him, within easy reach, and then widened to coach magically to avoid falling off.

He'd learned the hard way that trying to wake the ancient vampire when he was this deeply asleep, for anything less than, say, the apocalypse, would result in temporary paralysis due to having his skull and spine shattered against the floor. Tristan rarely indulged in the full vampiric death sleep partly because three thousand years of trained reflexes resulted in him attacking anyone who woke him too quickly.

Tristan's other apprentices had all mastered the art (it was, really) of waking the ancient vampire without getting a violent reaction. Vladimir had never managed that trick.

Vladimir had considered asking another of Tristan's former apprentices to contact their master, but that would be too great an embarrassment. He'd rather be paralyzed for a decade than humiliate himself like that. Two of the others were currently unavailable anyway, a third had vanished centuries earlier…and there was no way he was _ever_ asking for help from his fellow City Masters Anandi and Hadrian. Anandi was scary, and Vladimir had never taken Hadrian seriously. Master of London and an impressive leader he might be, but too soft spoken for Vladimir's taste. He was just too obsequious to anyone who he perceived as being stronger than he was, in modern language, a complete pushover. Vladimir was the opposite; he was an outspoken irrepressible rebel with a ferocious disrespect for authority (except Tristan, usually, of course). To his mind the fact that Hadrian had never once gotten torn to shreds by their master, and therefore progressed fast because he spent little time healing, while Vladimir had fought it out with Tristan eight or nine times a year for _six decades_ and took nearly a century to gain any independence _because _he spent so much time recovering, was completely irrelevant. Hadrian just wasn't ferocious enough to take seriously.

-

Tristan's rooms had been warded so well that the marble they were built from didn't even fully exist, magic having replaced it. Though if the magic ever failed they would revert to their original white marble. One of the more extensive wards protected him from telepathic attack. This ward was keyed to twenty or so individuals in case they needed to contact him. The silent shadows that flitted about in the immense palace noted the presence of one of their master's apprentices, or, rather, the presence of his mind as it went right through the wards. But they never interfered, and none of the apprentices had ever thought of asking one of _them_ to wake Tristan. Which amused the shadowy servants greatly.

Stretched out face down over most of a bed big enough for six the tall golden-skinned vampire appeared lifeless. Which, technically, he was. When awake he breathed only in order to speak, and sleeping the only movement about him was the slight twitch of his hair from the breeze flowing through the open windows.

Vampires had an advantage over mortals; when in a true death-sleep, instead of just a more human-like slumber, they did not dream. This meant that any magical intrusion strong enough to wake them did not have to be focused on to tell if it was real or not.

Tristan was fully awake the instant a tiny, tentative fragment of outside magic touched his mind. Without moving at all he seized the magic and the mind attached to it, yanking both away from physical body and wrapping it into a burning white flame of his own magic.

It happened so fast that Vladimir didn't even have time to realize Tristan _was_ awake before he was engulfed. A blaze of freezing white magic cut him off from his own magic, blood red flashed across his magical vision. Furious Tristan ripped open the intruder's mind, dissolving the defenses in less time than a human heartbeat. Once inside he picked out the identity and purpose.

Recognizing his apprentice his working brain caught up with his reflexive one. Heedless of the agony he was causing the ancient vampire examined his apprentice's conversation with the Master of Uzbekistan, copying the entire memory into his own mind. Finished he finally let go, reconnected Vladimir's mind with his magic, and both to his body. Almost half a world away Vladimir's body went into a screaming seizure as mind and magic reconnected and funneled the past half second of brutal mind reading to his body's nerve endings.

Tristan went over the memory a second time, deciding on the appropriate actions simultaneously. Used to planning as soon as information reached him he had completed the entire idea instantly. With that settled he turned his attention to his apprentice as Vladimir's agonized groan finally reached him. Start to finish the entire mind reading and plan had taken barely a full second with Tristan's mind and magic working at speeds far faster than anything any other vampire could match. This did temporarily shut off all possible communication – his mind and magic working faster than Vladimir could frame a thought. This was probably a good thing; by the time Tristan had managed to slow his mind down enough to communicate with the other vampire (which took half a minute) Vladimir had gone through a vast array of curses and was waiting for a response.

Tristan acknowledged that the Master of Uzbekistan needed to be executed, and agreed on Konovalov's right to do so. _I will mention this to the others, in case they wish to enjoy the show. _

_You wretched bastard! I do not appreciate having my mind ripped to shreds!_

_Vladdy darling, isn't it about time you went and asked Hadrian for some advice on how to NOT get mauled every time you wake me up?_ Tristan drawled gently. Then he had to laugh as his former apprentice just about roared at him. Vladdy was what Hadrian called Vladimir when he really wanted to make him angry. Of course, Vladimir had long since learned that it hurt less to contact Tristan from half a world away, rather than in person, but for a being usually so skilled in mind magic it was entertaining to see him go so many centuries without figuring this out.

Tristan went to work repairing Vladimir's mind, and sent a wave of healing magic into him. With it he slipped in a little bit of ancient magic that dropped into Vladimir's brain and caused it generate a state of complete relaxation not unlike that following a good massage.

_I hate it when you do that_ Vladimir complained. Tristan's ability to force someone's brain to generate just the right chemicals to cause any response he pleased was infuriating.

_You can alter the effect for pain._ Tristan replied, a torture technique that Vladimir was very familiar with, and skilled at creating. _You really are having an awful night aren't you? Perhaps you could use that torture technique with that reporter, or the guards who somehow missed his presence. Vent a little while you do it._

_Lovely, you went and read my whole mind._

_Couldn't help it, I read fast and there wasn't much there. _Tristan teased. Vladimir snarled like an angry cat. _Easy kitten. _Tristan chuckled.

_I need something more visible for those guards._ Vladimir muttered. _Perhaps a good old-fashioned bull whip. _Vladimir was good enough with one of those to cut a caterpillar in half without damaging the leaf it sat on.

_You have to just about kill them to have a real effect. _Tristan pointed out. Vladimir distantly felt magic prodding his fangs. _My, my, you broke your fangs gritting your teeth that hard. _ Tristan said, examining the damage with far too much interest.

_Fuck off_.

_Was that an offer?_ Tristan teased again. Vladimir shut his mind away, created an instant block against any playful sex magic, and stopped talking, sulking in silence while Tristan's magic swirled through him. He _hated_ it when Tristan decided to go into a full death-sleep. He always woke up ridiculously cheeky. Every one of Tristan's apprentices had endless stories about the practical joker the ancient vampire became after eight or nine hours of full death-sleep. He seemed to find it particularly amusing to make Anandi grow a tail that changed colors to match her mood. It was fortunate indeed, they all thought, that ordinary sleep, rather than the full death-sleep, was Tristan's preferred form of rest. _Sulking? _

_I do not sulk._ Vladimir said stiffly.

_Yes you do. _

_I do not._

_Yes._

_Shut up. _

_An admission. _

_Jackass. _

_Such a mouth you have, didn't your mother ever wash it out with soap?_

No, but Tristan had, twice. Vladimir immediately shut off all his taste buds, just in case. Tristan started laughing at that. Vladimir growled, and his guards stepped back further, knowing full well that getting his mind ripped apart would leave him snarling and angry for days. Never one to back down Vladimir snapped back. _At least when I do sulk I do so with proper vampiric dignity. _

_As opposed too?_ Tristan sounded just a tiny bit wary. He knew better than to ever think he actually had Vladimir properly cowed, especially not when angry.

_That smelly, filthy, dreary little cave you keep in Japan, the one that was once inhabited by cavemen, so very long ago. Such a…decrepit place…still has their shit lying around does it? Fitting for your age I suppose. Were you born there? Does it remind you of home, you damn Neanderthal? _

Vladimir kept his tone light and teasing, and his mind completely defenseless. Wary in case Tristan decided to get insulted. Normally he had an excellent sense of humor, but Vladimir had never been good at not insulting people. Over a thousand years had not taught him how to be properly humorous and more than one war had been started over a "teasing" insult.

Not that there would be any point in trying to fight back if Tristan did get angry, but a completely submissive gesture would usually keep him from getting angry in the first place. Tristan apparently was more interested in having fun at his former apprentice's expense. _You ARE a feisty one._ Tristan laughed back, and promptly activated every nerve ending at every ticklish point on Vladimir's body. As he finished repairing Vladimir's mind and left him alone he noted that his former apprentice was going to have a horrible bruise; he'd fallen off the couch and smacked his head. Vladimir finally managed to snap the magic, just before it turned truly painful, and woke up lying on the floor. Ignoring his bloody nose and concerned guards he growled mentally at Tristan. _Cute, real cute. _

Tristan purred, patting him on the head magically.

_You're a horrible monster really._

_Oooh, I like that._

_You would._

_You don't like being called a monster?_

_No._

_True it isn't quite as fine as being worshiped as god, as I once was, but I've learned that gods don't have nearly as much fun as monsters. _Tristan said. Vladimir changed the subject instantly.Tristan's time as _the_ being behind almost all ancient muggle gods had apparently been one hellish whirlwind of crazy ideas and general lunacy. Vladimir did not regret not being around for that as Tristan tested his powers and invented new magics almost every day while spinning the muggles minds like toys. No need to encourage any fond recollections; Tristan might decide to go relive it all just for the hell of it.

_What the hell happened to my nose?_

_You really do need to talk to Hadrian. _

_The damn Boy Scout – they're only good for eating you know._

_I'll have to tell Hadrian you said that. _

Vladimir started cursing at him again as Tristan laughed.

_I need to record your tantrums one day. _Tristan said as Vladimir suddenly realized he'd repeated himself and finally stopped.

_Those six hundred magical vampires in Uzbekistan? _

_Funny you should ask. I have an idea for them. Two possible ideas actually. But one that will severely disable the demons while disposing of the unfortunate wretches. _

Vladimir's guards backed away a step further as their Masters' still body started laughing maniacally.

-

"Welcome to the nearest local official apparition point to the Vilcabamba river." Daray said as he put the magical boat into the water. "Damn it, it's hot enough to make a vampire sweat blood." He added.

"If you'd cut your hair…" Silas stopped and rolled his eyes. Daray hadn't done that since starting at Akren.

The apparition point was nothing – a tiny three-wall shelter on the river bank. But the shelter had been kept in place magically, unchanged, for over a century, providing a constant point of reference and a place one could apparate into invisibly. To avoid alarming any muggles around.

"I'm amazed your grandmother didn't mind us borrowing this boat." Rahkesh said, for the third time. He rechecked the small handgun in his backpack and flicked the safety on. It was from the Akren armory. So were the stun grenades. There was enough of a chance of meeting a very hostile reception that they were being careful. But really they hoped to avoid any conflict. They had already agreed to do everything possible defensive before doing anything offensive.

"We've got a few dozen, and the others are all much more heavily enchanted. No one will miss this one if we lose it." Silas said. Given what had happened the last time the three had taken out one of the Ateres family boats this one would be lucky if it lasted 48 hours.

"Sierra has explored around here before, years ago." Daray said. Silas pulled out his sister's notebook. "She even went where we're going – where the Vilcabamba and Urubamba join."

"Yeah, she's the explorer type. Loves running off into the wilderness to poke around and see what magics or interesting creatures she can turn up. She found an emerald mine up in the mountains once." Silas said. "She's got some maps here, she's very good at making maps. And some photographs. Either we can magically speed the boat along, or we can take a chance and apparate."

"How long to the new moon?" Daray asked. Rahkesh had told them about Nicodemus's directions both to the Chachapoyaro descendents, and their hidden army. He had not told them the bit about the vision he and Nicodemus had shared. He needed to discuss that with Nicodemus. Even though he now knew why it had happened Nicodemus's second letter hadn't given enough information to really understand.

"Tonight." Rahkesh said. It was one very happy bit of luck lately. They had had a few days to prepare after leaving Akren, gathering supplies and making language potions. They were ready for whatever happened.

"Sierra has a bunch of good photos in here of some interesting rock cliffs not too far from where these rivers meet." Silas said. "From there it would only be minutes."

"Go as far as we can now, apparate once it gets dark?" Daray asked, "in case we're being watched by some of the locals?" Which seemed likely given that they'd heard some interesting sounds from the forest upon arriving.

"Sounds good." Silas agreed. "But there's supposed to be a village nearby. I think we should probably go further, though I'm sure the curious could still follow us we might be able to get ahead. No need to go disturbing the muggles."

Daray started up the boat again, the muggle engine making noise but doing nothing. Instead the movement came from the boat's magics, which flickered almost invisibly under his fingertips as they traced over the bow. Daray, being Daray, sent the boat off as fast as it would go, swinging it in an arch around a bend so fast that deep waves went washing up over the banks behind them.

"This is not a speed racer!" Silas snapped angrily and Nuri yowled.

_Fun. Do that again!_ Sygra hissed enthusiastically on Rahkesh's shoulders.

_You hate flying but you like fast boats?_ Rahkesh asked.

_I was not meant for your type of flying. When I fly, I fly with my OWN wings! A boat is another matter. _Sygra said as if this was blatantly obvious.

"Do you suppose any Chachapoyaro historians will remember us?" Silas asked softly.

"Probably not. It would be safer for us to go find that army first; there we could find people who we knew. But to bring them back without the permission of the people alive now would…be insulting enough they'd probably kill us or tell us to deal with the demons on our own. I'd rather try to work this out with the living first." Daray said. "Though, of course, they will remember _me_. After all, it's _my_ painting, in demon form, in their library."

"Ego, meet Daray, your long-lost twin." Rahkesh muttered. Then before Daray could respond, "I'm counting on that. And on that other large painting of me and Enireth." Rahkesh said. They had the smaller paintings, but the big ones had been left in the library, hung on the walls. The Chachapoyaro had ways of preserving such things very well, so there was a good chance they still existed, somewhere.

"I wonder if he's still around?" Silas said.

"I hope so." Rahkesh said, thinking of how crazy dragon fanatics like Mariah and Charlie Weasely would be. It would be fun just to watch. Daray now had the boat moving so fast the river banks were a blur.

Evening had turned the sky a dark blue fading into purple when they decided it was time. They didn't want to arrive in complete darkness in case something went wrong, and they wanted to arrive early. They set the boat onto the bank to apparate, Daray taking the boat with him. Silas waited behind, raising an eyebrow when Rahkesh looked at him.

"How's the arm?"

"Bad enough. I can apparate again though." Getting to the boat launch had been agonizing. He was using an old Potter family wand from the vaults, and it didn't match well. That alone was almost enough to knock him out cold. Rahkesh pulled out the bloodmagic knife he had made and delicately sliced open the runes for every healing piece of bloodmagic he had before apparating.

Agony flared from his injured arm, washing over him in a tidal wave of pain. Rahkesh slumped to his knees, choking, in too much pain to even scream. For several long seconds he shook, straining to fight back, then he switched and relaxed completely, accepting the fiery pain and letting it wash through him. Concentrating on the numerous bloodmagic runes that covered his body Rahkesh pulled at the pain and the tight ball of magic causing it. Dragging the magic out to unwind and blur and smooth out across his body, dispelling the worst of it. Finally drawing a few heaving breathes Rahkesh blinked away the dark spots dancing in front of his eyes, and stood shakily. Silas, who had appeared at some point, steadied him with a hand on his back.

A pair of glowing eyes fixed on him out of the darkness and Daray silently emerged from the shadows. He was in full true vampire form, completely silent and all made of shadows, flashing fangs, glowing eyes, and silky undead skin, nostrils flaring at the scent of Rahkesh's blood in the cuts on his skin. Rahkesh drew back the bloodmagic, sealing the cuts, and taking the blood back into himself in the process. Daray wrinkled his nose.

"That looked bad." Daray said, eyeing him carefully.

"It was bad. It's a good thing my bloodmagic is actually working." Rahkesh said. He caught a concerned look between the two vampires. "Don't worry; I'm actually doing pretty well as long as I don't use a wand or wand-based wandless magic." His bloodmagic was more or less functional again, though its use caused him some pain in his right hand. He had built some new runes that allowed his bloodmagic to flow around damaged areas, and to adapt as the damaged magic shifted. Mixing different pieces like that could be dangerous, it was not supposed to be done until he had full control of his magic – which meant his animgus form – and full control of that meant being able to do a partial transformation. But Namach had watched him working with the new runes and had decided that not having full control of his animagus, combined with the new magics, wouldn't kill him any faster than the magical damage in his arm would.

Rahkesh, just to prove he was okay, wandlessly conjured light globes and raised them over their heads. The murky river water was swirling around, glinting in the magical light.

"So how do we get in?" Silas asked, eyeing the water. "I'm not diving in there."

"There's supposed to be an underwater cavern." Rahkesh said.

"Bubbles then." Daray said, forming a bubble around himself and Satan. Rahkesh and Silas did the same around themselves and their familiars.

"You first then." Rahkesh said, grinning at Daray.

"Wimp." The vampire smirked, and stepped off the bank and into the water. Rahkesh rolled his eyes and followed, giving Daray a light shove as the water got to his knees. Silas laughed behind them as Daray turned the push into a dive. Nuri bounded past Silas and dove after Daray.

_Do you think there are tasty fish down there?_ Sygra asked. Rahkesh slipped under the water. Conjuring a small glowing orb he turned over and dove down.

_Only one way to find out right?_

Two meters below the surface the grimy dirty water suddenly cleared, and became much colder. Different layers of water, one flowing under the other. Rahkesh felt a slight mental nudge and very carefully worked a bit of magic out, focusing on keeping the magic flows contained in the small runes the went around his damaged hand.

I think this place is enchanted to keep the surface water so yucky. Silas sent to him.

Or this cooler water is flowing out of that cavern. Underground river? Daray suggested.

I guess we swim against the current. Rahkesh said. It seems to be coming from where the cliff goes into the river, good place for a cave entrance. His bubble had enough air in it for a little while. And he could either refresh it magically, or draw oxygen out of the water. The second option was much easier, without a wand, but he had to be careful in exchanging the air inside and the air outside – mix up the gas proportions to too much and it could cause problems. His easiest option would be to form another bubble on the river's surface, then draw it down and just switch bubbles. But he doubted they'd be down long enough to have to worry about that.

The cavern entrance turned out to be nothing fancy. Daray spotted it in the dim gold light. It was a narrow gap under the bank right against the cliff edge. About five meters down into a pit in the river bottom. The bottom of the pit was still several meters below. But the water lower down was very cloudy and murky, and warmer that the water they were in or the water in the river above them. Rahkesh instinctively didn't like it, and Sygra concurred, which was enough to make them all stay up in the colder clear water. Rahkesh was sure the river was no where near this deep; this pit was probably not a natural occurrence.

Who first? Daray asked, looking into the small gap in the bank. It was two meters high, but only slightly wider than Daray's shoulders (he was broadest of them). Rahkesh swam around the other two and grabbed onto a rock at the edge of the cave entrance.

_Sygra?_

_Sorry. I have no idea. I can't smell in water, and we're in a bubble. _

_I know. Look inside._ Rahkesh said. Sygra hissed and did so.

_Fish, none large than me. Some weird cave things on the bottom. Nothing that looks dangerous._ Sygra hissed to him. _And I do sense Chachapoyaro magic, but it's very faint._

Sygra can't see anything unusual – snake sight is a bit different. She does sense some magic, but its very faint. Rahkesh told the others. He used the rock to keep steady against the faint current coming out of the cave, and swam in.

-

Review please! You have no idea how difficult this chapter was to write.

Good news is that I already have a good chunk of the next chapter finished.

What to expect:

Meeting the Chachapoyaro, bringing back the sleeping army. Followed by battle training and moving people into the shelters or into fighting units. Then this fic will be done. I'll start the next one with the actual invasion and that one will have a LOT of fighting plus Rahkesh's very clever solution to the entire problem. Oh and Earth kicks ass and Namach and the elves fight it out and Rahkesh finishes his transformation during a major battle and many demons get killed. I have so many plans…this could take a while.


	25. Chapter 25

**New Spin-off Fic by Sakiku available on my favorites list, also linked to in my profile. **This is a multi-chapter fic written from Draco Malfoy's POV during the time he stayed with Rahkesh and Daray early on in Changes in a Time of War. It's a great read, she's got amazing characterization, and an excellent writing style that's fun to read. Please remember to leave her a review!

-

Chapter 25

The magical lights sent a dim glow bouncing off the cave walls, showing the rock to be deep red splashed with milky white and glittered mica chips. The ceiling dropped and the bottom of the cave rose, leaving a tiny gap just big enough to a person to fit through. Rahkesh sent some of the magical lights ahead of him and peered through the gap.

Beyond the cavern widened out into a larger chamber. Reddish stalactites hung from the ceiling with cream and red stalagmites lifting from the floor. A school of white, eyeless fish swam near the ceiling. Cave fish, which had no need of sight anymore. There were at least two different water layers, the cold one he swam in, and another, near the bottom of the cave, which shimmered around and made his head hurt, like he was looking in a liquid mirror.

-Nice. I like this place-. Daray's telepathic voice said.

-Typically vampiric, even underwater you still like dark caves-. Rahkesh snickered.

_I am swimming through an underwater cavern in a tributary of one of the world's largest rivers, with a hypnotist and a demon animagus who are grandsons of the world's most famous vampire assassin and a human/thunderbird/basilisk creature who drinks dragon blood, intending on visiting a race of beings, species unknown, who locked their civilization away a thousand years ago, in order to warn them of an impending demon invasion. Have I mentioned anything recently about my life being ever so much more interesting since meeting you Rahkesh?_ Sygra asked.

_Sorry? _Rahkesh asked, unapologetic.

_Not what I meant. I like excitement. But can we please get out of this water soon? There's magic here that makes me itch. _

_Or you're just going to shed soon. _

_It's the magic._ Sygra said firmly, Rahkesh didn't respond, he didn't argue with Sygra. Especially not about snake stuff. _What was it Nicodemus said?_

_The living descendants of my people, assuming they exist still, have only one connection to the world. On the new moon seek the Vilcabamba river, where it joins the Urubamba there is an underwater cavern._ Rahkesh repeated from memory, he'd read those two letters enough times that he knew them by heart, especially the second one. He and Nicodemus really needed to have a long talk about that, he hadn't even shared the second letter's contents with Sygra yet, and had asked her not to pry.

Well, okay, they were in the underwater cavern. Now what? Nicodemus hadn't provided any more instruction.

-So Thunder, where to…- Daray trailed off.

-I have no idea. Rahkesh admitted. Hey Silas, can you look around a bit, magically?-

-Why me?-

-Well in order to hypnotize someone you have to know that they have a conscious mind right? So therefore you can sense the _presence_ of a consciousness, even if you aren't aware you're doing it-. Rahkesh said.

-Never thought of that. Daray said, makes some sense logically, but magic doesn't always work that way, and we don't know much about how our little scorpion here works yet…give it a try Silas-. Silas, in his bubble, twisted around as nimbly as a seal in water, and began looking around. Daray closed his eyes and stayed still, reaching out magically. Rahkesh tentatively did the same, locating Daray and Silas's minds' easily. After two years of the vampires near-constant companionship he'd learned to identify their presences in his sleep (this was also deliberate training to avoid pranks).

Silas's mind these days gave off intense magic that had an odd sort of shimmer to it. Well, that's what it felt like. Rahkesh assumed this was his hypnotism thing. Such a bizarre ability to be born with, and it didn't appear until he was eighteen. Rahkesh wondered how on earth Cyala had managed to sense such a strange but unique ability, she certainly didn't add just anyone to the family, even if Silas had been part of the disowned section, so she must have known he had some unusual powers. Given the changes both his friends had gone through recently Rahkesh had to work to keep up with their changing magic, which was only fair given the crazy stuff his own magic was probably doing to them. Now be carefully blocked both, noting that Daray's demon side was perfectly settled and comfortable – normally Rahkesh couldn't sense it unless he really tried, and Daray would notice that and ask about it, but right now he had an excuse. With the vampires, and the familiars, blocked out he searched for what magic remained, and there was a lot of it.

The whole cavern was full of magic, old magic. Living magic, but distant. Whatever the enchantments were, they had not been altered, renewed, or even used in a very long time. It was, Rahkesh realized distantly, a little like the old living magic in Hogwarts stone walls. Not the fiery burning active magic of Akren, nor the ancient wards with their frightening intensity. More like Hogwarts. So no offensive magics – nothing to hurt. But magic to keep the cavern as it was for as long as the magic lasted. And something else…

-Got it. Below us…but there's nothing alive-. Silas said. Daray immediately turned his attention downward.

-No, it's an enchantment to observe whatever is in here. That enchantment is passive. There's something else to relay that information somewhere. And a response magic, something to act. That's the part that's really active-. Daray figured it out quickly.

-The one to react, the response, that one's designed to reach out and _do_ something-. Rahkesh warned. -Why isn't it?-

-No one's responding to whatever the other magic is sending?- Silas suggested.

-No, I think it's supposed to act on its own-. Daray said.

-Maybe we haven't actually contacted it yet?- Rahkesh said. -I think we need to go into that lower layer of water.-

-It is what the most of the observing magic is.- Daray agreed. -You first Thunder-boy.-

-Scaredy-demon- Rahkesh sing-songed telepathically. He turned and dove for the lower water layer. The surface of the current shimmered below him like a rippling mirror. Rahkesh closed his eyes and went in.

It wasn't water. It was magic, a shimmering pool of glass-like magic. Rahkesh felt it close tightly around him and his movement froze. The magic caught him, immobilized him. IT'S MAGIC! Rahkesh shouted, stopping both vampires centimeters from the surface.

-Rahkesh?-

-It's magic, this isn't water.- Rahkesh said. -I can't move.-

-It's pulling you further in.- Daray said. -You're sinking away from us, getting smaller.-

-Doesn't hurt, but I can't move.- Rahkesh said, holding himself calm. I-t's a directed movement, and I can feel the enchantments are acting. Now it's _doing _something.-

-Can you use your magic?-

-Yes. But not to get away.- Rahkesh said, -I can access all my bloodmagic but…I've got this sense that fighting would result in…oh…there's another piece of magic. If I try to get out it'll wake up.- Rahkesh fought to stay calm as he tried to sense the magics around him, but while they were definitely Chachapoyaroan in origin he couldn't sense the purposes.

-I can't send any magic into whatever you're in.- Daray said.

In the foreign magic, sinking rapidly downwards, Rahkesh was just barely avoiding panic. Furious with himself he breathed slowly and kept himself focused. He was from _Akren_! Akren's people did _not_ panic. Sygra rubbed her cheek on his shoulder. Well, he couldn't go back, and he doubted that the Chachapoyaro would set up an enchantment to kill anyone who touched it. They weren't that crazy. Well, they hadn't been…

-I'm going to dive down and through this.- Rahkesh said.

-Rahkesh!-

-Got a better idea?- Rahkesh asked. Getting no response he focused directly ahead, straight down…whatever down was, he had no sense of gravity anymore, and gathering his magic he pulled himself in the direction he was already moving.

-Damn it, I guess we're going too.- Daray sighed, magically accelerating downward.

-Can you imagine what Professor Namach would say if we didn't? Never mind Ahmad. Or that Moody fellow. Or Ally and Rianae- Silas grouched as he followed, Nuri swimming eagerly alongside.

-It's not like the Chachapoyaro are all _that_ homicidal- Rahkesh said, trying to move faster. The enchantment instantly let up, let him move, and sent him hurtling downward. Rahkesh built up speed, magic rippling around him as he moved with the strange foreign spells that held him. Flashes of light slipped past, bright bursts of white and green light, shifting to gold. The feeling of water vanished, turning to air-light pure magic. He was free falling with waves of magic flowing over his skin, wrapping him in layers of shimmering power. Rahkesh closed his eyes as the magic built and blocked out everything but the steady sparkle and swirl.

XXX

Rahkesh woke abruptly, coming out of a deep sleep. But he didn't move, even faster than he realized he was awake he sensed something was wrong and remained still. Eyes closed, body relaxed, breathing slowly, Rahkesh tried to figure out what was wrong. He had been trained for this by his combat teachers – they'd appear in their students rooms and if the student gave away that they were awake they got attacked, since, after all, going from sleep to battle was also a useful skill.

He was lying on a very soft bed. The light was a soft gold through his closed lids. The pillow was rather hard. The bed was also long enough for his full height, nice. There were people there, even breathing, sleeping then. And other people, moving a little but not much. No vibrations from walking. They were sitting. Rahkesh breathed a little and decided he could smell a few people, sort of. Without bloodmagic his sense of smell was not so great. Better than it had ever been when he'd left Hogwarts though. The transfiguration teacher had taught them to pay attention to smell as a sign of their transfiguration going very wrong. The mind magic lass also emphasized awareness in its early stages. And naturally Namach included smelling your blood into his classes, you could smell and odd fluctuation in a ritual faster than you could sense it any other way. And combat classes, Ahmad figured you could smell almost as much information about your opponent as you could hear it.

Rahkesh also sensed Sygra, coiled on his chest, awake but pretending to sleep. He reached out to her and she felt him wake. Sending a vague question he got a response, six people, all Chachapoyaro (they smelled different than other humans, if, in fact, they even were human). They were seated around, expecting their visitors to wake very soon. Nuri was awake and lying beside Silas, Rahkesh heard him growl. Satan was awake but had escaped out the window despite it being daylight. He would, undoubtedly, bring back lots of interesting information. Daray was awake, Silas was not. Rahkesh found his familiar's mind and sent a question by way of feelings of intentions and motions; could Sygra get out through the walls if she needed too? Her ability to go through solid objects was difficult at best and extremely painful at worst, but it was useful. Sygra considered and responded with a tentative affirmative.

Well, time to let everyone know he was awake. He'd let Daray wake Silas, Daray's mental connection to his cousin was pretty good; Cyala had been training them to connect with their family since Silas's parents deaths.

_Felling okay?_ _How dangerous a situation do you think this is?_ Rahkesh hissed, rolling his eyes around as if just waking and blinking. His hissing startled the six sitting around them. Two of them even leapt upright while the others visibly jumped. Nice, he'd have to gloat at Nicodemus for their poor observational skills, when he saw him again.

_I am well and so is everyone else. I woke two hours ago and was still wet. We can't have been here long. I do believe two of these people are healers, on the basis of the weapons three are guards and I cannot determine the purpose of the last one. _

Rahkesh sat up slowly, ignoring his audience for a moment, fluffing the pillow a little and leaning back against the massive wooden headboard. Daray didn't move but Nuri looked up, stopped growling, and began to bathe his claws. One of the guards was by the window near Silas's bed, keeping a wary eye on the big black panther.

The room was a massive oval of sand colored stone. Rounded grey marble pillars at either side of the three doors had amethysts set into them spinning amongst wavy gold runes. The ceiling had crystal and candle chandelier-like things hanging from it and bowls of soothingly aromatic oil burned on the top of each door frame. There were six beds, but only their three were occupied. The floor was white stone bricks laid into a geometric pattern. Rahkesh recognized the runes on the pillars and the geometric patterns instantly, they were the same as those used to ward and protect the healers building at Vailape, the city they had stayed in during their first visit.

The people, he noticed, were definitely Chachapoyaro. He'd recognize that appearance anywhere. Tall, with their odd gold-like skin and all but one had very light colored hair. Orange, blue, red, and purple eyes, sharply defined eyebrows. Well, they had made it to the right place.

Having recovered from their start at his waking the three warriors moved slowly to take positions near the doors. The healers were looking at some sheets of canvas on the wall, where bits of magic were flashing in a pattern. The last of them, a tall white-haired man with orange eyes, glanced at the warriors, then Daray, who had propped himself up on some pillows while waking Silas telepathically. Finally he turned to Rahkesh.

"Good morning, do you feel hurt anywhere?"

Rahkesh stared, and stared, and stared, and then realized he needed to respond…in English. They spoke English. Perfectly modern English. A civilization cut off from the world for a thousand years spoke a modern language, with an odd accent true, but not a trace of their past language.

"I feel fine, Daray?"

"Same here."

"How long have we been asleep?"

"Five hours. The spells on the caves are supposed to keep you out for six, but the three of you have strong minds." The older man said. "I am Hevgedril, do you know where you are?"

"I know _what_ you are." Rahkesh replied, he had already decided to get straight to the point. The Chachapoyaro had been rather blunt direct people, and he didn't feel like he had neither the time nor the patience to try any slower way of explaining who they were. "We were friends of the Chachapoyaro ancestors of your people – unless you still call yourselves that – a long time ago…about a thousand years ago, actually." The healers and warriors all turned to stare. "I'm not sure yet which city this is, the last time we visited your people we stayed with some friends at Vailape. We fought with them during the initial Incan invasion. You'll find the complete records of us written by Vailape's head sorcerer at the time, Kalahimran."

Their hosts stared at Rahkesh in shock for a few moments, Rahkesh ignored them, having guessed they'd need a few moments to absorb that information. Instead he twisted over his newest injury, his scarred hand and wrist, examining for changes. His whole arm ached dully, and as he flexed his fingers bright points of pain shot through his hand. Rahkesh accepted the pain and didn't flinch, focusing on where it was coming from. He noted that the pain came from the points that seemed to have the densest concentrations of his disintegrated wand in them, then he found the new bits of bloodmagic. They wrapped around the bad spots, helping to move magic without it going into the wand remains. It wasn't an ideal system, magic was supposed to flow through every cell of the body. Ordinary bloodmagic was basically (very basically) permanent spells that altered some magic to a new state, or allowed you to achieve that sate when you wished, but magic was still in very molecule of the body. Moving that magic around some piece of flesh was damaging and painful, even if it was less damaging and less painful then not doing anything.

Okay?

Surprisingly, yes. I suppose their magic didn't really go into us.

I'm more surprised you didn't react horribly to being zapped in the head by some unknown magic. Daray said.

I almost did, but then I reminded myself that these are the Chachapoyaro, and they're not intent on harming anyone, crazy as the Xuelhuala are, and I do not feel threatened overly much by them. Not because they couldn't kill me but because they want nothing from us, expect nothing, and are happy to reside in their peaceful silence for eternity. Rahkesh explained, there isn't much here to be wary of unless you upset them or harm them first.

True, even Nuri didn't sense anything dangerous about the magic in that cave. He was eager to go into it. Silas pointed out.

Rahkesh rubbed his thumb over the lightning-like scars, feeling their slightly raised lines. Nicodemus had once asked if crazy life threatening occurrences were normal for him, Rahkesh had denied that any such things happened regularly, and Nic had not believed him for a moment. Really Rahkesh thought his life wasn't so insane, but lately he could almost set his watch by when the next unexpected battle would happen. He could only imagine what Nic would make of that.

"You _what?_" The question came from the old man again.

"I am Rahkesh Asmodaeus. These are Daray Ateres and Silas Ateres. A while back we encountered an unfortunate bit of time travel. We wound up a thousand years back, in the city of Vailape. Unfortunately for us this was just before the Inca launched their attack on that city. We were there aiding the healers during the worst of the plague, and we joined with the city guards and the Xuelhuala to battle the Inca later. When it was possible the city's sorcerers sent us home to our own time." Rahkesh spoke slowly and clearly, wondering if he should have taken a believability potion. Now he began on the bit that was a lie. "Before we left one of the Xuelhuala Generals left us with a very specific request – that we find some way to ensure, that if the day ever came that Earth was threatened with a demon invasion, we would return, find what was left of his people, and warn them."

Rahkesh waited, wondering if it was just a bit too much to take in. Then the old man turned to his companions and began speaking so fast Rahkesh's ears hurt. But he was speaking a language Rahkesh had never heard. One of the women replied, slower, and Rahkesh caught a few words, including "Xuelhuala" "Vailape" "records" and "library". So it was some modern variation of the ancient Chachapoyaro language. This was more reassuring, though it did not explain how the old man spoke such excellent, if oddly accented, English.

Silas was awake, sitting up as well, cross legged in his bed. Rahkesh rubbed at his ear, relieved to find his earring there, the spells intact. Silas was watching everyone attentively, but Daray was leaning back a little with his eyes closed. Rahkesh guessed he was probably communicating with Satan, since the bat had fled and was probably out and about in the city, keeping hidden. Daray opened his eyes and glanced over at Rahkesh.

"Were all the cities the same, in layout?"

"No. Not exactly."

Daray grinned and shook his head. "One of us must have some good karma built up then. I think we're in Vailape."

"Really?"

"Satan thinks so. Oh, and you'll love this, there's a dragon statue over against the cliffs behind the city."

Rahkesh grinned, remembering that Sharahak had said that Enireth and had gotten along well with his new human (or whatever) friends before joining Nicodemus with the Xuelhuala.

The old man, Hevgedril, turned back to Rahkesh, as the others all fell silent. One of the healers and one of the warriors had left the room in a rush, Rahkesh assumed to go try to find any mention of them in the library. Sygra wrapped herself around Rahkesh's arm and slid up and onto his shoulders. Rahkesh reached up to stroke the top of her head, noting absently that she would be shedding again soon.

"Very well. Let's assume, for a moment, that I believe you. What does this mean?"

"I promised to return to warn your people when the demons were about to invade Earth. At the time we were the only real contact your people had with the outside world apart from the Inca who they were fighting." Rahkesh explained.

"And now you're back, do you mean…?"

"The demons are barely seven weeks away from an invasion." Rahkesh said softly. "They sent a plague into Europe…you know the continents?" He got a sharp nod in return, though he was starting to get an idea that the only person in the room who understood him was Hevgedril. "The plague killed over a hundred thousand. The demons also sent in a small army to attack into Mexico. They were met by a mixed species force and defeated. There have been various other demons spotted almost everywhere in the world. At the same time we have learned that the demons began sending in their sea demons several hundred years ago, and just recently some magical beings have been disappearing." No one had yet found the missing sirens. "We know from the elves that the magic blocking them will fail in seven weeks, give or take a day."

"And they will invade to rule the world?"

"No. They cannot survive here for long. No. They want to capture, take back to their realm, and enslave, all magical life forms." Rahkesh said. "They will then leave Earth alone, apart from returning occasionally to abduct any new magical humans born to non-magical people."

"And you know this how?"

"We have an ally who escaped their realm. The memories of one of their sorcerers were stolen during the battle in Mexico, it and some captive that are currently being interrogated have independently confirmed all of this. The demons are coming, with an army of hundreds of thousands, millions even. And I have a request from a good friend and General of your Xuelhuala to warn you, and the Xuelhuala, that what they feared has finally happened."

XXX

Squadrons of vampires on brooms or flying carpets, set in perfect V-formation, flew down out of the sunset, none dead, none injured. Below them the land was littered with dead and dying vampires. A few figures moved among them, collecting those that could survive, chaining them and removing them to the black tents beside the main camp. They also stopped to kill those that were not quite dead yet, and with permission to practice whatever magics they wished on the dying there were few being taken back as captives.

The earth was spongy, soaked in blood, and radiating the remains of violent magic that made the feet ache and caused a slight haze of death magic on the ground. Limbs lay separated from bodies, and dozens of completely clean skeletons were draped over the forest that started off in the west and ran over the hills. The open Mongolian grasslands where the rebel vampires had made their final stand were red and black, the grass trampled and burned away to open empty earth, and ashes soaked in blood spray.

The signs of the magical battle were everywhere in the form of still-transfigured rocks, trees, and limbs. Bits of orange ice were melting into the earth, and the seeds of magical plants were sprouting and growing at a visible rate, feeding on the abundance of magic. A lot of them weren't choosy; the magic of war and dead magical vampires suited them just fine. Six hours and the finger-tall plants would be in full bloom with their blood-red flowers, and then they'd be dead within a full day. But they would be converting death magic to living, and that would be used by other plants.

Other magical seeds that had hit the earth at some point since the last local magical event were also sending out shoots, slower. Maybe six days until they grew fore-arm length stems and begin to flower. Magical plants grew fast when magic was abundant to feed on. And other, slower growing plants only germinated when they could get magic, which the plants then altered to make it their own, which grew into the plant's own magical channels so it could produce its own magic. The outcome of this battle would be measured in new magical productivity at this location. The Mongolians would probably make it a park or a reserve.

The occasional burned and greasy splotch on the bare earth marked the complete passing of some unfortunate in blaze of fire. Around him more vampires erupted into flames, screaming, and perished, writhing in pain as they burned to nothing, their very blood combusting, leaving behind only a small grease patch, and not even that if they were old. The sun would last only a few more hours, but the injured could no longer fight its lethal effects and succumbed to the flames. Beside him a short vampire, missing all her limbs, gurgled, and burst into flames, gone in…thirty-eight seconds. Tristan Namach smiled grimly as he crossed the bloody blackened acres left behind after the battle, finally arriving at the command center.

Death magic wafted past on the evening breeze, bits of and shreds of souls and the little blinks of magic given off by the dying. Undirected death magic wasn't terribly useful, but it could be turned to a few purposes and so two shadows flitted quickly across the ground in front of him, soaking it up and taking it away. With so many dead he'd had to call in a few of his servants to collect it all. He waved them away as the vampires at the command center noted him and shifted nervously. Behind them large tables were spread out on the grass alongside rows of neat tents. The fighters would remain for the night with their prisoners before heading home with their captives the next day. By his decree they would not travel by night; easier to stake out any uprising captives for the sun as examples, and better to test the warriors. Doing things by daylight was more difficult, and now more than ever everyone needed an incentive to train and improve.

The former Master of Mongolia, who had claimed the entire country, was kneeling a few meters away from the tables where names of the rebels were being taken from the memories of survivors, to trace their creators back and find where they had all come from. He was unhurt, for the moment, merely naked to the suns' unforgiving rays and collared and leashed to a solid black post set in the ground. Tristan had brought him out partly as a statement to everyone else there, and partly to show him just what a _proper_ vampire Lord did with problems in his territory. Two of his advisors who had advocated getting Konovalov to get Tristan's help with this problem were chained next to him. Six of his own guards were keeping him captive; it amused Tristan to do this when he removed someone powerful, as a way to test the guards. They were doing their job competently, and he filed away their magical signatures and names, you never knew, given that vampires existed forever, maybe someday it would be good to remember them.

"Antonio." Tristan said, finding the last of the advisors of the former Master of Mongolia. He had been the one to insist on dealing with the rebel vampires on their own, without asking for help, and if they did need help, contacting Tristan directly, he'd even offered to do it himself. This one understood that a vampire lord who could not control his territory didn't deserve to rule it. He had been loyal to his former leader for several hundred years, despite the other being rather less than acceptable he _had _given Antonio a high rank, wealth, and security. Tristan had chosen to let Antonio, the one in charge of the small but surprisingly well-trained fighting force, lead the battle. The vampire, a native of Mongolia since birth, was probably taking the whole thing personally, which was an added incentive to do a good job. But he had to know that Tristan was studying him, trying to determine his usefulness when properly motivated (as he'd be when the demons attacked). Tristan usually examined the vampires surrounding a leader who needed to be removed, to see how they measured up, given their suspect commander. Letting Antonio lead the battle was mostly to test him, and Antonio knew it.

"Three hundred and forty-five captives, Lord." Antonio said, pleased. His commanders had backed off when Tristan appeared and were watching nervously. Antonio didn't look at all fazed to have the highest ranking member of his species present. The commanders were wary and agitated and fearful, and either they had forgotten to hide the scent of this, or they didn't know how, or they were attempting to show deference to a more powerful vampire by not hiding anything. Whatever the reason they were making his nose ache, and he wasn't even using any of his scent-based bloodmagic, just the normal vampiric senses. So maybe they could fight, but apparently they weren't good for much else. Tristan looked back at the fliers landing and the last of the ground forces returning.

"How many of yours are left?"

"All." Antonio said smugly, there had only been ninety. Vladimir Konovalov had supplemented them with two hundred of his own, but Antonio and his warriors had deliberately been given the worst of the battles. Tristan had hinted that the best would probably be considered for a place in the shelters. All the magical races intended to fight to the end, but if the worst happened they would have to take cover, and there would not be room for all. Tristan had picked two of Antonio's warriors, one of which he wanted the soul of for his own forces to use, and the other who would definitely have a place in one of the shelters, should the worst happen. Regardless of his slightly odd loyalties and un-vampire-like lack of ambition (why on earth hadn't he killed off his lord himself a century ago if the fool was clearly so incompetent?) Antonio did know how to train excellent fighters.

"My Lord, what should I do with the prisoners?"

"Keep the fifty five strongest. Of the rest, after their origins have been determined, kill them. Each of Konovalov's vampires gets one of them, and your own warriors get one each." Tristan said, meaning that all of those who had fought would get to kill (and therefore get the blood of) one of the prisoners. Blood of a magical vampire tasted so much better than that of almost anything else, and vampires gained in magical capacity by killing another vampire while drinking their blood, maybe not much, but they did. And it really was like a drug, not addictive but perfectly sublime. As an added bonus drinking the blood of another magical vampire would heal injuries, and their life-energy would confer additional healing ability for some time. "They've got ten hours, if they haven't finished killing their prisoners by then I will."

"Yes Lord. The others?"

"My servants are selecting the strongest as we speak. They will remove them…have removed them." Tristan amended, smirking as he registered shock from everyone in hearing range. His servants were fast and efficient, responding to his orders as he thought them. "They will be of use against the demons. The others need to die. Ten hours Antonio."

"Yes Lord." Antonio said softly, glancing at the tents the captives were stored in as a guard came running out, undoubtedly to report the sudden disappearance of fifty-five of them.

XXX

Six hours after waking Rahkesh was downing a headache relieving potion and fully ready to turn into his snake-self and go coil up in a corner somewhere and wait until the chaos ended. The magical transport might not have harmed him, but it had affected him worse than the vampires and he was tired. Daray had finally taken over dealing with their hosts, which was very fortunate indeed as Rahkesh was just about ready to kill someone. They had met with the city council, explained themselves repeatedly, answered the same questions multiple times, had someone call them all liars, listened to a furious debate from those who believed them, and as proof of their claims trickled in from the libraries disbelief had become awe, which pissed Rahkesh off, and then real worry and urgency.

They were indeed in Vailape, which struck Rahkesh as just a bit on the insane side of unbelievable, until he remembered that since Nicodemus had known all about the Chachapoyaro's withdrawal from the world; he had probably had a hand in setting up the magics. Asking one of the librarians he confirmed that it had been a Xuelhuala-driven piece of magic. The other warrior-city, Xaiaxelo (shy-ah-shell-lo), had done most of the enchantments for the warriors trapped in time (and had their hosts had some sort of panic attack when Rahkesh asked about that!). His knowing about _that_ had been what had finally convinced everyone he was telling the truth. That and someone had, after two hours searching, found them in the historical texts.

As suspected, the paintings with them in, done during the victory celebrations following the Inca defeat, still existed. They had been found hanging in the ancient history section of the city library. Rahkesh had had a good laugh at the idea of himself being ancient history. Daray had been a bit annoyed at finding his painting no longer holding central place over the entrance to the library.

The city council, nineteen people at the moment, was meeting. Now that they firmly believed their three guests the only remaining issue seemed to be what to do. It was clear enough that they were indeed the same three as had been accidently transported through time to the city, and who had fought with them against the Inca and helped their healers during the plague. The full effect of having their help was hard to determine, but it must have been considerable, given that the vampires had eventually been the ones to separate the sick and dying from the healthy for effective quarantine. And Rahkesh, finally citing Nicodemus as the one to transfer a request from the Xuelhuala (almost true) for them to return to warn their friends' descendents of a demon invasion, had immediately gotten a response. Nicodemus was apparently one of the most famous Generals Vailape had ever produced and after a thousand years still a local hero.

"Why don't you contact the Xuelhuala and the Xaiaxelo and have them deal with what to do about the demons?" Daray finally asked after listening to the council argue war preparations for two hours. There was a long pause, and Hevgedril (apparently the head healer and a council member) chuckled.

"When a foreigner knows better than you how your system functions, and what would the best action to take, it is time to retire." He said, grinning. "I suppose it would be easiest to give this issue to them, though we will have to deal with our own citizens and defense systems eventually." He turned back to the rest of the council, who were looking at Daray questioningly, and repeated what Daray had said in their language.

Three of the council left to write up the appropriate message, and everyone else took a break to eat. Being the only one who spoke their language Hevgedril split from the rest of the Council to stay with their guests.

"If I may ask, how did you learn English?" Silas asked Hevgedril.

"It is standard procedure now for a few select individuals to leave the homeland every fifty years to examine the outside world. One or two people per city leave for a year or two, and then return. They go as a group for security and pose as muggles until they have a handle on the language. All who go must be capable of reading minds, and we gain and introduction into the current magical world by scanning a few minds to learn how to act and speak so that we do not stand out. And we use enchantments to disguise our skin and eyes." Hevgedril replied.

Rahkesh, slowly eating fruit slices and wishing his head would stop pounding as he chewed, winced as he heard rolling drums. They still used drum messages. He hadn't learned the drum language last time he was with these people, but due to the plague and war he had learned the entry code for addressing the Xuelhuala. The three council members returned a few minutes later.

"Did you send everything we told you by drum?" Rahkesh asked, "that was a short message."

"No, no. That would take hours. No we sent a signal to open one of our message portals." Hevgedril said.

"The what? I don't recall ever hearing of those." Rahkesh said.

"You would not have, they were invented about a century after you left. It's bloodmagic of a sort. The Xuelhuala invented it. They got some interesting information off of that demon portal, and combined it with their own magical knowledge. Basically there's two golden bowls of blood, one here and one in Xuelhuala, a message dropped into one arrives there seconds later. I don't know the exact magics involved, but that's basically what happens. We only use the system rarely and it's kept magically closed most of the time, partly for security, the Xuelhuala are ever paranoid, but also because the blood has to be the dying blood of a person and it doesn't retain its magic forever. It does get used up, so we use it as little as possible."

Professor Namach, Rahkesh thought, was going to be over the moon when he heard about this. In fact, he and the Xuelhuala would probably get along very well indeed. Actually the Xuelhuala would probably work well with Akren overall. About time someone did.

Hevgedril, as the resident expert on outsiders, was assigned to the guests. After the healers agreed that, apart from Rahkesh being tired, they had suffered no apparent ill effects from whatever magical transport had been used (and the three knew better than to ask about something Xuelhuala created) their guide led them on a brief tour of the city.

Vailape had changed since their previous visit, but in many ways was much the same. It was larger, with new buildings in a slightly different architecture, more ornate, but also more magical. Rahkesh, walking through on the areas where people lived, noticed that the artwork on the buildings seemed to be magical in nature, and certainly _felt_ magical, and this he felt safe asking Hevgedril about.

"It is magic. We suffered a few earthquakes several centuries ago, and while there wasn't much damage everything was rebuilt anyway. We needed to expand and people wanted different housing types so it was the right time to do so. The magics there serve several purposes. They keep us safer from earthquakes, they lend strength to the magical shields over the city, allow the city to rebuild itself after damage, send otherwise damaging storm events like lightning elsewhere, and allow for buildings to be dismantled or altered quickly."

"I'm surprised at how similar everything looks." Daray said, "I don't know how much you know about other cultures, but a thousand years means major change everywhere else I've been." Hevgedril looked pleased, as if he'd been complemented.

"We've had little need to change. Our population has probably grown by half since you were last here, but now it is stable. We added two new cities as our warriors magical abilities to look after them expanded. Because they're new they're more unique than any of the others, but I like the feel of the older cities better. More of our people's magic in the earth and stones. Our architectural preferences have gone through six major revisions, well, major for us, but with the newest magics on the buildings people can magically alter their own homes. We did experiment with electric lighting, but found it incompatible with large magical undertakings. We have however mimicked many other changes in the outer world, but we really are very much the same."

"No major social changes?" Rahkesh said.

"We still believe in communal raising of children, once at a certain age. And as always our best and brightest are either our defenders or our teachers, those who look after the next generation." Hevgedril said, smiling. "And some of our magical advances have caused changes in basic everyday life. I know the warrior cities used to function on slave labor from those captured in battle, but a long time ago General Nicodemus put an end to that, amid a general political shift in all the cities. Of course, at that point we didn't have anyone attacking us to be capturing people _from_. Our population expansion about two hundred years after the plague you experienced brought about some fairly major upheaval, the vast majority did not approve of the plans, and so it took nearly a century.

But I'm no historian, I think you'll find us different in some ways, and very much the same in others. We like our system; we're safe, healthy, well fed, with clean cities, minimal political strife, there's enough room for everyone and plenty of opportunities for different lifestyles."

Unless you want to have kids and the people in charge of population regulation won't let you. Daray muttered telepathically Or you're born with either a mental defect or an extreme physical one, in which case you die, but that I approve of entirely, even if the mentally deficient are often easier to feed from, at least among magical beings. They had never found out _how_ exactly population size overall was regulated, but they also hadn't really asked, and they weren't going to now. Rahkesh strongly suspected bringing the Chachapoyaro into the world at large would have some major issues attached, population control being one of them.

Well, their clothing has changed. Silas remarked. Hevgedril was wearing simple dark red pants and a black sleeveless tunic with tiny rubies in patterns over it, plus a black belt and black leather boots.

Not so much. Bone carved armbands with gold and rubies in them, gold and rubies tied into his hair, gold and red feather magic-filled necklace, gold around his wrists. They're still huge on decoration. I don't suppose they've switched to a monetary system? Probably not, and the cloth materials are the same, except I haven't yet seen any reptile skin. Daray said.

I prefer the lack of it. Rahkesh said, and got snickers from both of them and whisper of "snake-boy" from Silas.

People were watching them curiously from balconies or stopping in the streets to watch them pass. Rahkesh grimly ignored the stares, by the time they'd been here a year last time people had thought of them as familiar faces and were more likely to call out a greeting then stare or ask about where they came from. Now he got to do it all over again.

"Do you think your people will rejoin the rest of the world?" Rahkesh asked.

"Well don't have much choice do we?" Hevgedril said. "A demon invasion is a demon invasion, and we can't expect to handle them all on our own. Better to join forces than fight by ourselves. I'm sure the Xuelhuala will agree."

"But you'll be keeping your cities in this…erm…removed from the world magical land of yours?" Daray asked. "Since the land where you came from now has people living there you can't really put all this _back_."

"No, no. We never planned to. We copied everything and removed it permanently. And completely, we do not connect to the rest of the world in any way – we're our own complete system in here. Well, we get the same earthquakes these lands to in your world, but not much else. Probably not too surprising that the weather changed shortly after we did it, and everything was a little crazy for a while, but eventually it all sorted itself out. That's why we took so much land, so there'd be room for our lands to stabilize." Hevgedril explained. "Of course, I expect the demons would find a way in eventually, so we're better off fighting with the outside world rather than alone."

"You've been to visit other places, how do you think it will go when you're people start mixing with others?" Silas asked curiously.

Hevgedril laughed, "Silas it will be the worst culture shock ever experienced! I expect most of them will remain here, and leave rarely if at all, or only to fight. But eventually we'll mix in wit everyone else, and them we'll be in for it! So many new ideas…I do wonder if we'll even survive as a people, quite possibly not. It depends a lot on whether we are indeed our own species or not."

"You don't know?" Rahkesh had always wanted to ask, but he hadn't, it surprised him that they hadn't bothered to find out.

"After I and my group returned we wanted to do some tests, find out. But we weren't able to get much support, no one cared. I think most everyone here thinks of themselves as a different species, but I don't know. I mean, according to our histories we _were_ humans. But something changed at some point, obviously, we're all magical, never mind the physical differences."

_They smell like a different species_. _Not like werewolves, who were human, nor vampires, who are dead reanimated humans, they smell different._ Sygra said, answering Rahkesh questions, if she thought they smelled like a different species then they were. But he wouldn't mention that.

XXX

Rahkesh woke to the sound of distant thunder…no drumming, the thunder was all in his head. A little disappointed that he hadn't awakened to a nice wild storm Rahkesh listened in to the message. From the Xuelhuala, but the rest was lost to him. It was morning, two days after their arrival. They had been given rooms in a very nice building that seemed to function as a privately owned hotel, but also had rooms kept for important visitors from other cities.

"Xuelhuala are almost at Vailape." Daray said, wandering into Rahkesh's room a few minutes later as Rahkesh pulled a shirt on, not bothering to knock of course. Rahkesh made sure the Akren crest was settled onto his left shoulder, they were representing Akren after all, and he fully expected Headmistress Alefly or someone from the AAA to request to view their memories. Last time it hadn't mattered as much, being a thousand years in the past and Akren still functioning as just a school and not as much as a united fighting force. Now it mattered.

Daray was in demon form lounging on the thick woven furniture that was a cross between a couch and a hammock. He had to raise his wings a bit to avoid getting his wing claws tangled, and his tail draped over the edge. Satan was perched atop a wingtip. Sygra was wound around one of his forelimbs. Seeing Rahkesh awake she dropped off and crossed over to him, Rahkesh picked her up and put her across his shoulders.

"Why a demon?"

"Because I like it. Oh I like my vampire form as well but they're both, well, _me, so_ I don't really have a preference most of the time."

"What are you going to do about the Chachapoyaro knowing who you are? If a demon gets someone who knows, they'll know about you."

"I hadn't thought that far. I'll be little use as a spy if they find out."

"So you are seriously considering that?"

"We might _need_ a spy in their realm."

"True, still it sounds very unpleasant."

"It does. I am not eating human infants for dinner or munching on some roasted foot." Daray sighed, "well, if it was really necessary, maybe I would. But as Sabien pointed out I would have to convince them I was somehow like Sharahak, a demon raised in the human world. I doubt they'd believe it. I'd have to find some other way. Since there are millions of them I could probably a avoid detection, but I haven't asked Sharahak about it yet."

"So what do you do for now?"

"Stick to being a vampire. The fewer who are reminded of me the better. That painting of me in demon form has been hidden by the Council. I'll stay as a vampire here and at home. Unless they're all ancient history experts no one will remember that one of us was also a demon, and they won't know it's me and not you or Silas, and the Council and librarians who do know will say nothing."

"I'd suggest talking to the Xuelhuala about it."

"Yeah, maybe they could put some magical blocks on the minds of those who know."

"No, because if they were captured the demons would notice and would want to know what knowledge was being blocked. Better to make them actually forget."

"A good idea, there are several ways it could be done, and if the Xuelhuala asked they'd do it." Daray said, and transformed as they heard footsteps outside. The vampire was wearing all black boots and pants, with a rust colored sleeveless top, Akren crest on the left shoulder. Satan was on his other shoulder, looking sleepy now that the sun was up.

_Will you be with us today? _Rahkesh asked Sygra.

_Yes. The Xuelhuala respected me. I rather liked it._

_Yes, oh Queen of serpents._ Rahkesh teased.

Distant drums again, then a series of horns ringing off the mountainsides, from some distance away still. "That was fast, only two full days for them to get here." Rahkesh said. It had taken them several more days to get between cities a thousand years ago. He wondered how they'd speeded up the process.

"Hevgedril said they keep horses now, a few anyway." Daray reminded him. "One of the city guards says they've just passed the closest drum station, so maybe two hours."

"They aren't bringing a whole army are they?" Rahkesh worried.

"I didn't ask, but I think someone would have warned us, or at least warned the city to expect extra guests."

"We'd better get over to the Council Hall, they'll want to have use there when the Xuelhuala arrive." Rahkesh said. "I'm leaving most of my weapons here, with the Xuelhuala around…"

"Good idea," Daray said with a grimace, "wouldn't want to give them any reason to get nervous."

"I was also thinking last night, the Xuelhuala might be a bit more suspicious than the Council, and it might be an idea to really make a shocking first impression. You remember that greeting the Xuelhuala used to acknowledge respected warriors not from their own city?"

"Yes. They used it with the city guards and with us."

"Yes, that. I was thinking we should use it. After all, they are respected warriors from a different place than us, therefore it does apply. And I'll bet they still use it, the Xuelhuala liked their traditions."

"They probably don't use it often, being isolated from the rest of the world. What if they don't recognize it?"

"They said used it with the other warrior city representatives, and with Vailape's guards."

"Okay, we can give it a try, can't hurt."

Rahkesh and the two vampires ate with the Council, who seemed very excited to have their guardians coming. The three guests had taken language potions again and were mostly up to speed on the modern Chachapoyaroan language, if still slipping sometimes and struggling with new words, of which there were many, and changed pronunciations. They hadn't bothered hiding this from their hosts, knowing that the Xuelhuala would probably notice that they could understand what was being said. Shortly after the morning meal had ended a guard came running in to say that the Xuelhuala were approaching the city gates.

The whole city turned out to see the Xuelhuala Generals arrive. People packed onto balconies and rooftops and filled store fronts and walkways. The guards kept everyone off the walls and out of the center of the streets, but with what seemed like every citizen in Vailape there to watch and the noise and crowding was extreme. Rahkesh was glad he hadn't brought Sygra, and Silas sent Nuri back to the Council Hall to wait when the panther began to get aggressive and frightened of the crowds of noisy people.

When the Xuelhuala appeared Rahkesh knew it instantly because the entire city went silent. Abrupt painful silence that made his ears ache after the earlier tumult. He, Daray and Silas were standing behind and to the left of the Council on the steps of the Council Hall. The city's gates were straight ahead and he could see over the Council's heads fairly well.

The Xuelhuala were riding black unicorns, the glossy black beasts with their slightly curving needle-sharp horns were clearly visible, rising over the heads of their riders. The animals were decked out in black, gold and red tack that was hung with small feathers placed into threadmagic alongside magic-filled tiny slivers of gemstones. Their riders were in black as well, black armor and leather with threadmagic runes done in gold and red all over them. Rahkesh could remember the Xuelhuala he'd known in the past often wearing camouflage-like greens; apparently they weren't bothering right now. Nothing subtle about this; there were eight of them riding side by side in twelve ranks, all in black, red and gold, long capes falling down over the unicorn's backs. Rahkesh's couldn't recall a more awe-inspiring sight, unless he counted Namach's Ice Dragon animagus.

"That's rather a lot of them, given that there's not battle going on." Daray whispered in English to Hevgedril, who, like all the other Chachapoyaro present, seemed entranced.

"You _did_ come to tell us about demons invading this planet." Hevgedril said softly.

The Council members waited until the Xuelhuala had stopped and three of the first rank dismounted before bowing low, Rahkesh and his friends did not copy them. Four ranks of warriors dismounted and walked towards the Council, two other ranks went to surround the Council Hall. Four more ranks dismounted and went to the stairs leading up onto the walls, spreading out across the city walls among the guards. The rest turned as one and went back out the main gates. Rahkesh could distantly see them riding or walking up almost invisible trails along the hills and then vanishing into the rock or shrubs to keep watch.

The unicorns, at a spoken command, turned left and trotted off around the back of the building, where Rahkesh assumed there was some sort of stables. He watched the massive shiny black animals leave, and turned back in time to see the Council leading eight of the Xuelhuala towards him, five men and three women, the rest moved fast to take up guard posts inside the building. Well, he'd known these people were seriously paranoid and true professionals, but he hadn't been around to watch them take over a city before. They were serious about security.

Rahkesh understood moments later, of the Generals heading his way two walked with canes and some of the rest were very elderly. He noted that two of the others wore stripes indicating them to be healers, while two more wore white stripes across each shoulder, and Rahkesh was pretty sure that meant the Xuelhuala's personal academics. Obviously all of them had at one point been expert fighters, but of the eight of them five were very, very old. The two young armored Generals were probably the ones currently in charge of most of the army, and the rest retired advisors. Not the sort of people you risk losing.

The Council Head, an older woman named Korinahma, was speaking quickly to the highest ranking of their visitors, guessing by the numerous gold and red bands on his shoulders and arms and gold medallions. She and the Xuelhuala turned to Rahkesh, and he responded before anyone could say anything, bowing a little bit with his back a straight line, eyes down, left hand over right breast, right hand lightly touching his left elbow, then straightened, dropping both arms to his sides, giving his full name as he straightened.

The Xuelhuala all stopped on the spot and stared. Korinahma and Hevgedril traded looks, and then Hevgedril grinned brightly. Rahkesh, remembering the Xuelhuala he'd known a thousand years before perfectly, met their apparent leader's eyes solidly and didn't blink. Beside him Daray repeated the motion and introduced himself, followed a second later by Silas, each of them eyeing the rest of the Xuelhuala calmly. The one Rahkesh was facing didn't seem to notice the two vampires, eyes fixed on Rahkesh. After a moment he looked away and glanced at the two vampires for a moment, and then at Nuri, who sat silently at Silas's side, and at Sygra, who leaned out a little off Rahkesh's shoulder and reared her head back. After a moment the old man smiled.

"Asmodaeus, Ateres, Ateres, welcome back to Vailape."

XXX

Three hours later the Council, along with the eight Generals and the three guests, were in a large sitting room on the uppermost level of the Council Hall. The room was filled with low woven chairs not unlike some beach chairs Rahkesh had seen. They were heavily padded and the room was littered with large heavy pillows made to resemble the backs of chairs, and thick carpets.

After brief introductions the Xuelhuala had immediately begun questioning their guests on the demon invasion. After three hours of questioning Rahkesh thought he might have given them everything he knew. The Generals were intense, and asked good questions, and listened to the answers. Four of the warriors were sitting along one wall, taking notes, but each of the Generals was taking his or her own notes as they went. When the group finally paused for refreshments Rahkesh thought he might have a chance to ask a few questions of his own.

"When we were last here your people had just acquired a rather unique ally, a dragon, named Enireth. Do you happen to know what became of him?"

The oldest of the women Generals, Ciforiam, pulled a set of papers out of a black leather folder she had brought with her and began looking through the pages. "We brought a summary of our records of you with us." She explained quickly, "as for Enireth, he came to join the Xuelhuala at our city, along with one of our best Generals, Nicodemus. I understand you were actually responsible for freeing Enireth from the demons?"

"Yes."

"He eventually became General Nicodemus's familiar, to the point where they could communicate telepathically. Enireth was a valuable ally indeed; we never had a problem with dragons hunting us when he was with us. He also was the one who brought us the first of our unicorns, he found a herd that had been brought to our lands by some strangers from another land, and took a few home with him, thinking they could be useful."

"That's good to hear." Daray said, "what about Nicodemus?" The sharp looks he got from everyone surprised him, "we were very good friends while we lived here." The vampire pointed out defensively. The Xuelhuala traded looks briefly before the highest ranked one, Korashanal, shrugged.

"After joining the Xuelhuala he led most of our fights against the Inca, who didn't stop trying to destroy us until about two decades after you left. Nicodemus was eventually the one who led a political drive to get rid of our slaves, and later he was also the sorcerer who arranged for our complete removal from the outside world. While he was with us he rebuilt Xuelhuala for better defense…particularly against demons. He trained the first of our cavalry with the unicorns Enireth found, and his plan to end our slave-based society was mostly driven by his eventual plan to keep us safe by removing all Chachapoyaro from the world. Nicodemus was probably our most accomplished General. At the age of thirty-eight he chose to join our time-frozen army, and Enireth joined him there."

Rahkesh did his very best not to grin wide enough to split his face, but it was a near thing. Nicodemus and Enireth were alive! Well, sort of. And with the demons invading the Xuelhuala would doubtlessly finally awaken their sleeping fighters for the battles to come.

_You're giving me a headache, being that happy._ Sygra commented.

_Then shut down the link_ Rahkesh replied, euphoric. _Oh I can't wait to see those two again, and Sharahak will be delighted. _

"We've told you everything we know about the demons. If there's anyone who knows more then they haven't shared it with the Magical Life Forms Conclave." Rahkesh said. "I suspect some of the battle planner could give you a better update on what is currently happening."

"If we'd go meet them," Sonivale, one of the Generals, said stiffly. He was one of the younger armored duo and Rahkesh had already pegged Sonivale as being a bit insecure and stuffy, probably because of so many higher ranking warriors being around.

"We're here to warn you on Nicodemus's request. And he said nothing about bringing anyone else along." Rahkesh pointed out. "But his recommendation was a joint action plan."

"I think we can agree to that." Ciforiam said, but the others all scowled at her, she scowled back.

"Thank you then Rahkesh, and you Daray, Silas." Korashanal said gently. "We'll have to discuss what to do about this. Bringing our people back into contact with the outside world is a big decision. And, more importantly perhaps, we must decide whether or not to awaken our army."

-

Whew! I'm sorry about the slow update; I suffered a computer virus attack and lost more than half of this when it was nearly done. I think the rewrite actually has a bit better dialogue. Next time I will remember to hit the little "save" button more often.

Please Review! Reviews are always appreciated.


	26. Chapter 26

I'm sorry I haven't gotten around to responding to reviewers the last few chapters. I rarely do but sometimes I try. If you have pressing questions email. I think in the next chapter I'll try to give some responses (just don't ask how many more chapters, I just go where my mind leads me). Oh and no one has yet guessed Rahkesh's final transformation. hint: a dragon is what most people guessed, and I do hope I've never been THAT predictable. As always please review, reviews feed the muse and help me get back to writing when I'm lazy.

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Chapter 26

"It will take the entire Guild to unlock this."

"Then we get the entire Guild." The Grand Master replied. "We could annihilate a great many demons with that" he added, gesturing to a massive circular table with a black and white marble yin-yang symbol, on the table sat a glass vase with a black substance swirling menacingly inside, and pulsing at regular intervals. "That things soul will be able to give us a demon based death cloud like nothing ever created, if we work it right. I have the fifty-five magical vampire souls we'll need, plus the fifty-five dementors."

"When?"

Namach had to think that one over carefully. They didn't have much time left, and he couldn't send a golem to do this, he couldn't have any of them operating while he was working with this kind of magic, nor for days before it. The Necromancers Guild was busy, mostly building armies out of skeletons, death magic wards, miniature death clouds that worked like grenades, soul destroying devices, inserting miniature soul draining magics into weapons, putting life-magic stealing spells into magical bullets, death magic bombs, and other weapons.

"What is your contact timetable like?"

The Masters of the White and Black Orders were the only ones who knew where all the world's necromancers were at any given time. Tristan Namach was the head of the Gray Order, which was composed only of necromancers who were Masters, of any level, in both Guilds. As such, he was also the Grand Master of the entire Necromancers Guild. However he generally left it to the Masters of the two Orders to run things – there weren't enough Grays for him to have much to do in his own Order.

"We can probably assemble in eight days." The Black Order replied quickly. The White Order, predictably, shrugged. White was chaos, and so orderliness was not their thing. They did report in to the Order Master, and he did know where they were and what they were doing, but he didn't expect them to be totally honest.

"Nicholas." The slow voice enunciated every syllable smoothly, like ice cold water. The Master of the White Order grimaced at hearing his name in that tone. Like all but a rare few of the world's necromancers he had been trained at Akren, and knew better than to try the ancient vampire.

"If I tell them to get here in two days, they will be here in two days." The White Order obeyed force, and he had killed his predecessor to get to his current rank. More important, while White was easily corrupted, they were also self-preserving. Siding with the demons was out of the question, they knew from the memories of the demon who had led the attack in Mexico that anyone who made a pact with the demons would be betrayed. Therefore survival lay in fighting, and winning. And so the White would assemble faster then the Black; they wouldn't be bothering to take the time to think it through and they would be willing to destroy whatever projects they were working on if necessary to get there on time. The Black Order tended to be more leisurely, though Nicholas knew that if Tristan ordered it, they could probably be assembled in a single day, the White would take two even if ordered, simply to be different. He also knew Tristan knew this, but usually didn't work that way with the necromancers.

The Conclave had decided that waiting for the demons to arrive on Earth before attacking them was a poor tactic. Cyala's brood had discovered a portal the previous night, and he intended to use it to take the war into the demon realm. They would need time to figure out how to open the portal, then they'd need the necessary sacrifices – the human governments were supplying those, then he was hoping to send a death cloud specialized for demons through.

Tristan was also hoping to add some magics of his own creation, to cause rapid expansion as the cloud ate and destroyed souls. But such a cloud might not last long, and so he needed to stabilize it. This could be done three ways, but the only way that did not involve massive loss of human life would be to get a thunderbird to infuse the death cloud with raw energy in the form of electricity, to create a spider-web like structure within the cloud as a center focus.

Magic and electricity could mix a little, so the web would hold the cloud together until overwhelmed by the death magic. Ordinarily magic could not be contained this way, and so the electricity used had to come from a magical creature, hence needing the thunderbird. However those were unstable, existing only as long as the storms that created them did, unless they mated and created a larger storm system that spawned more. So they could either wait for a really big storm, or get the only thunderbird animagus to do it. Given that no one had yet truly learned how to control the weather, Tristan was going for the second option. Unfortunately Rahkesh had chosen at that moment to be off getting the Chachapoyaro back.

While Tristan fully supported bringing back the Chachapoyaro, and sincerely believed his three students did have that responsibility and were best for the task, he was not at all sure he wanted them fully part of his world. As allies he suspected there would be none better, both of the Ateres sons spoke highly of them, as did Rahkesh. And he had seen more of their memories of the Chachapoyaro than any of the three knew. He wanted to meet the Chachapoyaro, more importantly he wanted to know where Rahkesh's future actually lay, with them or with the rest of the world. Tristan did not deal well with competition; he either destroyed it, or he brought it around to working within his plans as he had with the elves, though they thought the same about him.

"I am eager to meet this thunderbird." Vivian, the Master of the Black Order, said, having figured out that they would need Rahkesh for their death cloud plan.

"Gather them in one week." A preemptive strike like this would not show too much of their capability, and would make the demons fierce and angry. Their society expected an easy victory. They had plenty of evidence from Sharahak, the captive demons, and the stolen memories, that the average demon was prepped and eager for war. If they were expecting an easy victory, and if their government and news agencies, such as they were, were predicting success, then such a preemptive attack would shock them. Then they would be angry, because they regarded themselves as being inherently superior beings. They would be furious, and fury in the soul of every demon alive suited Tristan Namach's purposes very well indeed.

He wanted them angry. He wanted them enraged. He wanted the full might of the demon army sent crashing into the world like angry gods.

Earth had gods of its own waiting to meet them.

He wanted a clash between their civilizations that would leave one or the other annihilated. No more standoffs, no more centuries of guerilla tactics, no more spying and plotting. The shelters would not last longer than a decade. If they could do nothing after that he would use his final weapon, and destroy all of Earth's sentient magical life, including the demons. The magics he had prepared would extend after consuming the demon energy on Earth. Once the ones on Earth died their deaths would fuel his killing magics and wipe out the species. Obviously Tristan had a back up plan for himself; he had no intention of ending his own existence.

"And how do you know he'll be back by then?" Nicholas asked.

"Because if he isn't _I _am going to go bring those people back myself." Tristan growled. The ancient vampire promptly vanished, leaving the two Master Necromancers to stare at each other across the table.

"I do hope Mr. Asmodaeus makes a timely return, else things could get very difficult." Vivian said calmly, looking not the least bit concerned. Nicholas snorted and rolled his eyes, this thunderbird irritated him; a thunderbird ought to be a White necromancer, being all chaos and destruction. Vivian, however, was certain Rahkesh's magic was entirely towards the Black Order, given that thunderbird's only existed until the chaotic imbalances that created them ended. Tristan just smirked and acted superior when anyone asked about his student.

XXX

"We're honored to be here." Rahkesh assured the Xuelhuala sorcerer standing beside him. The man was barely older than he was, apparently new to the Xuelhuala and instructed with watching over their guests as the ancient time-frozen city of Xariath was woken. In this youngster's case "watch over" was synonymous with 'intimidate'. He had been scowling at then for an hour, evidently disapproving of having outsiders there.

Truly it was a miracle they'd been allowed here at all; no outsider had ever seen any of the warrior cities, not even Sharahak, and he'd stayed for a lot longer than they had. Not only were they going to get a look at one of the cities, they would also be allowed _inside_ it. And, just as important, they were going to witness the magics used to hide it and protect it all these centuries. This could not just be goodwill towards their friends. Rahkesh suspected an ulterior motive. Perhaps it was growing up in a war, or his complete adoption of the Akren thinking system, or perhaps he was just a bit too jaded, but he suspected there was another, very logical, goal. The Xuelhuala and Xaiaxelo wanted their visitors to see their city and their magic, knowing that they would report back to the rest of the world. And with their new way of studying the outside world every once in a while they would know that this report would awe possibly every other species and civilization in existence. Rahkesh didn't know if the Chachapoyaro knew about the elves, and he didn't know much about the fae, but whatever magics the Chachapoyaro were about to display, they were showing off their full magical capability, the pride of their entire people wrapped into an enchanted city, and they wanted the world to know how powerful they were.

Rahkesh was eagerly looking forward to what sort of a display the Chachapoyaro thought could astound the world so much, Xariath was their biggest project ever and the magic must truly be on a grand scale.

"Do you think they'd be upset if I asked about their obsession with city names beginning with an X?" Daray asked in English.

"It's not an X in their language."

"It's still the same sound then."

"I doubt there's a reason."

"Fetishes aren't usually reasonable."

"You would know, given the one you have with my couch." Rahkesh replied coolly.

"Be quiet, both of you, they're starting and I want to watch the magics. You know someone at Akren will insist on getting a copy of our memories, and I don't want to explain why we missed something." Silas told them.

They were atop a protruding rock pile, facing into a massive empty valley between two mountains, with a massive mountain rising at the far end of it. Rahkesh could feel absolutely nothing magical about the place, which had given it away instantly – every single inch of the eighty-kilometer road to get here had been tingling with magic. And the profusion of magical plants giving off magic into the air made him feel more alive than ever, his hand had even stopped its persistent ache for a while. This made no sense since he was absorbing more magic right now. Rahkesh suspected it had something to do with him identifying the magical difference between the phoenix feather remains and the wood remains, and accepting the phoenix feather remains into himself. He had spent six hours dispersing the feather's magical essence through his body evenly, and felt much better. The bloodmagic channeling magic around the unmovable wood remains in his hand had less to do.

Mountain plants grew thick all over the mountains and hills below them, and this valley was the only un-forested area, apparently some sort of natural meadow, or kept that way somehow. There were no streams in it, even though Rahkesh could see a waterfall pouring off a mountainside far back inside the valley. Clearly something strange was going on here.

Five thousand warriors from Xuelhuala and Xaiaxelo were placed in ranks in a half-circle out in front of them across a small piece of the valley floor and the lower slopes of the mountain sides. Units of two hundred each had been dispatched each of the mountaintops in visible range. Rahkesh had seen some blips of blue light and blue fire around the peaks briefly, and assumed they were somehow connected.

More warrior sorcerers were scattered around the valley, on the edges. Evenly spaced in pairs, with each carrying some unusual equipment; a solid black drum, a black instrument that looked like a fairly typical reed flute, a black stone container with an unknown substance inside, and a fist-sized skull carved from a solid perfect diamond. Rahkesh hadn't known diamonds existed that big, he'd seen a few around Namach's rooms but had assumed they had been created by the ancient vampire.

Distantly drums began to beat, Rahkesh couldn't see the sorcerers but they were all keeping a perfectly synchronized beat, and he could definitely see the fiery sparkling red enclosures forming over each of the sorcerers. He had a set of ordinary binoculars in his trunk in his earring (magical ones might cause a problem) but he wasn't getting them out in front of all the warriors present. Soon, even without utilizing his magical enhanced vision, he could see green magic racing across the valley floor in a dizzying array of colors and fire-like formations.

Distant reed flutes began to play, a wavering melody that caused golden magic to strike out from the players and twine with the green magic. The magics began to dance across the valley floor, rising up the mountainsides in waves in time with the beating drums. Red sparkled around each of the pairs of sorcerers and bits of red magic broke away and flowed out onto the valley floor, twisting into the greed and gold.

"They used musical enchantments" Daray whispered, "oh that's _clever_; it's a field of magic hardly anyone has explored. My father and mother did surveys of its use all over the world years ago, among human magic users, they're very good at it, but it's hardly developed at all."

The drums and flutes shifted and the volume rose abruptly into a wild dance of noise. The magic on the ground rose and formed into a massive three-dimensional crackling sparkling web with no pattern Rahkesh could follow. Green, gold, and hints of red surged up off the valley floor. Blue fire flared across the mountain peaks and golden strands of magic leaped to join with it. The blue fire shot down through the green, gold, and red webs to the valley floor.

The drums and flutes shifted again and the magic began to twist and flex, forming into a massive three-dimensional spiral rising into a wavering, blurred, amorphous tornado-shaped funnel of light. Now the drums were no longer working together, each flute and rum set separated into its own piece, together weaving the magic up the mountain sides and into the air, changing the funnel into an expanding dome of magic that reached up to cover the mountain tops where the blue fire roared up to connect to the top of the dome.

In the sky above the sun set and twilight descended fast. Then the sky began to ripple, the stars moving as if they were reflected in rippling water. It was a dizzying effect that crisscrossed the sky. Flowing out of the ripples, lights appeared, rolling like the aurora borealis over the top of the magical dome. Inside the dome the magic separated and flew to the outside of the dome, and turned blue, leaving the center space open. The valley floor turned into a mesh of thousands of shades of green magic.

Slowly the colorful display in the sky wrapped itself onto the top of the dome, then out of the empty air inside the valley, the shimmering magic sank, forming a solid block of shimmering magic.

The drums and flutes went silent.

The entire magical constructed shifted to gold, then to red, then to blue, then to green, then into a vast sparkling mesh of colors that slowly shimmered, raining down to the ground and sorting itself out into thousands of curtains of magic, falling across the valley. The flutes began to a wild dancing piece that set the magic to dancing through the air. The drums began again, a heavy rolling thunder. Then the magic began to roll back, forming in layers an immense ethereal magic city of colored lights that filled the entire valley, reaching up both mountainsides and far up the peak behind it. The green magic surged up to its walls as the blue and gold magic from the sky descended into waves and then rolled back to reveal a new layer of the city. Each layer of color adding to the solidity of the mirage-city that floated and rippled just over the valley floor.

The dome faded slowly as its magic poured down into the city in waves of shimmering dancing magic, and then faded, leaving behind a more and more solid city. Slowly the colors of white and golden stone began to come through as the magic fell away, covering the rooftops, then the tower tops, then finally only the air shimmered, and then this too faded away. The blue fires on the mountain tops remained, casting a blue light across everything, and the green magic pulled back, leaving the city firmly set into the valley floor, white walls rising high over the meadows.

Xariath was huge, starting half a kilometer back into the valley and filling the rest of it, sprawling out over the basin, rising up the mountain at the end. Its walls wrapping all the way around the mountain and the city spread across both sides of the valley like wings, built of tan and soft gold colored rock enclosed behind massive white walls. Beautifully ornate, even at a distance, arching flame-like tower tops soared over the distant walls and the city that flowed up the mountainside was built with sharp flaring edges, harshly beautiful and so magical it made Rahkesh's eyes ache, even though he couldn't see any of the actual enchantments.

The warriors who had been standing absolutely still rushed forward, forming up in two rows, facing each other, in a straight line from the valley entrance to the city gates. At a shouted command that Rahkesh didn't recognize each lifted a diamond knife and cut their right palm. They then joined hands across with the person opposite, hands held flat, palm down, fingers interlaced. They all knelt, placing their palms face down onto the ground. Rahkesh noted that they were lined up with the Xuelhuala on one side, with the Xaiaxelo opposite, using the mixed blood of both cities to awaken the sleeping one.

Beneath the bloodied grass green magic shimmered into existence again. The magics flash like fire and burned back, splitting open the ground down the middle of the lines of the warriors. In the space appeared bare white stones, cut into geometric shapes and wedged together, forming a wide road leading to the city. The stones were built into patterns and runes, and their soft white surfaces were completely smooth and clean.

The warriors all stood and separated their hands when the road touched the city gates. The leading sorcerers of the Xuelhuala and the Xaiaxelo then walked past the rocks where Rahkesh and his friends were watching, and down the road, one of them closely inspecting the white stones as she went. The warriors waited until they reached the city gates, then broke ranks and moved into formations out on either side of the city, a few breaking off to go get the drummers and flute players.

"Okay, now I'm impressed." Silas muttered softly. Nuri purred, ears flicking towards the city.

_So am I_ Sygra commented from Rahkesh's shoulders. _Can we go see Nicodemus now?_

_That might have to wait a while. The first thing to do is to make sure the enchantments worked, and then get them all up to speed on what's happening. Then make sure this place is functional, then hold a gathering to decide how best to go about meeting with the rest of the world. Then begin preparing for war. _

_Is this place capable of supporting itself? _Sygra asked. Sygra, Rahkesh decided, was one very smart snake.

_Yes, look back behind the city._

_It's connected to the mountainside in back. _

_Exactly, the walls wrap all the way around the mountain. Our…helper over here told me that there are farms in the valley on the other side of the mountain._

_Do you suppose we'll get to go to the MLFC meeting after this?_

_Well someone has to introduce them. _

_Oh good, I imagine it will be entertaining. _

_XX_

While the Chachapoyaro had been okay with letting their visitors watch their magical ceremony to bring back their ancient city, and they were okay with having them as guests in the city itself, they had not allowed them to join in the magics to awaken the sleeping army. Instead Rahkesh, Daray, Silas, and their familiars, got to spend several hours pacing the three small guest rooms they'd been given.

Or, rather, Daray paced incessantly while Silas studied potions and Rahkesh stared out the window.

The city of Xariath was, Rahkesh had decided, the single most amazing city he'd ever seen. It was built on a completely different level than Vailape, or any city he'd ever been to. The stones it was built from were white, a soft golden stone, and a pale gray. Arches, pillars, and sharp edges seemed to have been favored by the designers and the artists responsible for the fire-like designs and decorative stone runes everywhere must have worked for decades. The streets were paved in pale gold stone and the stones had been cut into beautiful geometric patterns that twisted everywhere. Gold, silver, and copper decorated every wall, every door, every pillar, and every window. The chimneys were wrapped in solid gold chains built to look like leaves or raindrops, the doorways had copper flames arching over them, the pillars had gold and silver poured into intricate etchings in the stone, and copper accented every railing on every staircase.

The city was centered in the valley, but sprawled up both sides of the valley on the gentle slopes, and far up the mountains behind. They would not be allowed to see what was on the other side of the mountain, but he'd heard it was farms, forests, and training courts. The high walls were built close to ten meters out from the buildings and the area between was soft green grass. The walls were white, mostly, and very high, but given how large the city was and how far out from the building they were the shade from the walls didn't seem oppressive. The buildings all had stone covers for the windows, built inside the thick stone walls and able to slide down and cover the windows, with the stones cut so closely that a knife blade couldn't get between them once the stone "shades" were down. They reminded Rahkesh of the similar structures used by the Ateres to protect their fortress. Towers were everywhere; almost every large building had a few with tops that stretched upwards in flame-like shapes. Arching hallways ran around above the ground, connecting buildings. These were built in a manner that looked almost delicate, light and airy. Built like thin feathery trees, sort of. The ceilings were stone slabs cut to slide down and cover the walkways. Where the buildings met the ground their sides sloped outwards, with ridges and flame-like downward facing pieces, all polished smooth as glass. This was to deflect spells, thrown objects, and invaders, but it was done in a beautiful style and edged in precious metals.

Full, the city probably supported fifty thousand, though Rahkesh had been glared at, then ignored, when he'd asked. At present there were about six thousand guests, and the city seemed empty and ghost-town-like. Most the visitors had set up camp outside the walls, putting up big red and white tents. Rahkesh wasn't sure why the three outsiders had been allowed in, but he was glad, it looked like it might rain that night. Probably the Chachapoyaro were showing off again, they certainly had reason to. Just the decorating metals in sight would be enough to buy a small country, and a beautiful as everything was a second look showed a city build for war. Rahkesh had not tried to sense out any of the magics around him, though he could dimly feel them. No one had asked them not to, but he felt that doing so might be a bit intrusive. He and the two vampires had agreed that there were magics in place to sense anyone trying to sense them, and probably observational spells on all of them, and so they politely didn't peek at the layers and layers of enchantments.

The twilight mixed with flaming torches and was turning the whole city gold and red, and snow on the mountains was almost pink from the red and blue flames still visible on the mountaintops, though those were slowly fading. Rahkesh saw Satan drop out of the air and stepped aside as the bat zipped into the room and landed on Daray's head in a ridiculous manner. Daray claimed his bloodmagic that helped him withstand sunlight had partly transferred to his familiar. Rahkesh had wanted to ask what else had transferred, but hadn't. He'd looked up magical vampire bats, none of the three species exhibited Satan's magical ability to expand to such massive size, or to breathe fire, or to create flame at all, though they could create shadows. Sometimes it seemed like Satan had also taken on some of the magic that made all Ateres vampires Dark Angels.

"Satan thinks they've finished the magical part of waking up their…ancestors." Daray said as he held a hand up to let Satan feed from his wrist.

"Three hours, maybe four, to make sure they're okay and bring everyone up to date." Rahkesh guessed. A meal had been sent to them a few hours previous, but he suspected they would not be seeing any more of their hosts than that until the next day at least. As skilled as the Chachapoyaro sorcerers were they had never awakened anyone from being frozen in time for centuries, and they hadn't minded admitting to some uncertainty about how long it would take to get everyone functional.

Three hours later Rahkesh was alerted by Sygra that someone was approaching. Sygra's ability to sense vibrations through the floor was apparently something the Chachapoyaro warriors hadn't thought of, amazing. The door to their rooms opened and General Sonivale entered.

"Good evening General." Rahkesh greeted him politely, holding out a hand to the empty chair. Sonivale ignored him stiffly.

"The awakening of the Xariath warriors was a success. However they and our sorcerers have had about all they can handle for the moment. We will convene a gathering of the Generals tomorrow mid morning." Terse, informative only if you wanted bare facts, and he wasn't actually looking at any of his so-called-guests. Daray raised an eyebrow at Rahkesh, who was listening to Sygra. Rahkesh shrugged, Sygra claimed Sonivale smelled angry, which was nothing new.

"That's good news. Will everyone be attending the gathering?" Daray asked.

"Yes." Sonivale's reply was curt and cold.

"What can we expect at the gathering?" Daray continued, assuming that "everyone" included them.

"The Generals will be viewing your memories of the demons, and possibly some that General Nicodemus has. Then they will make a decision of whether or not to fight with your world."

"Your world too." Rahkesh said softly, "the demons do not distinguish such things; to them everyone is only future prey and slaves."

Sonivale shrugged and turned towards the door. Rahkesh and the vampires traded looks, wondering who should ask what was wrong. Daray shook his head when Silas moved, and raised an eyebrow at Rahkesh. Rahkesh got up and headed for the door. Like Daray he'd noticed that Sonivale hadn't gotten within three meters of the vampires so a human might have better luck with the young General.

"Sonivale," Rahkesh said softly, coming even with the General in a few strides, the door closing behind him.

"What?" Sonivale asked sharply.

"Will the return of all these warriors change things for the living?" Rahkesh asked, guessing wildly at Sonivale's problem.

"What?"

"You are concerned, unless I'm very much mistaken, about having to compete with so many unknowns." Rahkesh said, slowing his pace a little, Sonivale did the same unconsciously.

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are. Are you worried they'll displace you?"

"No."

Rahkesh stopped instantly and rotated to face Sonivale. "Sonivale, if you had been selected to be one of those frozen in time, waiting for your people to need you as a fighter, would you have gone?"

"Of course."

"And, when you were woken, how would you have treated your descendents, the ones who had brought you back?" Rahkesh asked softly. He continued before Sonivale could respond, "Would have tried to rule over them, or treat them as anything less than your equals?" No response. "These people were trained in the same manner as you Sonivale. Trained to the same code, the standards, do you really think any of them would try to take your position away? Is that what you Xuelhuala do?" Sonivale just stared angrily at him. "I don't know what your training is, but I know that I've seen the teamwork your warriors have. And that does not come from constant competition. You only get that kind of teamwork when those involved are fighting for each other, as well as themselves and their cause. Is it really so hard to trust people so like yourself?"

There was a very long silence as Sonivale glared at him before he finally looked away. "They are the best our people have ever gathered."

"You think they'll find you lacking?" Rahkesh didn't really expect an answer. Sonivale's concern did have some merit, which meant absolutely nothing given that the returning warriors would be far more likely to enter into a join retraining program than anything else. Rahkesh didn't know the Xuelhuala well, but he did know Nicodemus. Even if he'd only known him for a year Rahkesh was certain his friend would not have changed so much as to agree to criticize those he met when he was finally awakened. "If you were one of them, would your first reaction be to start criticizing everyone? Even if they weren't as good as you were? I don't think you would, I think you're trained better than that Sonivale, though I don't know you well I do know you would not be a trusted Xuelhuala General if you were to have any inclination to act that way." Sonivale didn't respond, but Rahkesh didn't need him to, Sonivale was listening, and listening was enough, you couldn't _un-hear_ something, so he would have to think about it. "Try to give these people a chance Sonivale, if you judge them now you'll never know them. If you were one of them, a woke to find people ready to be defensive to everything you said, you'd probably not react very well, and neither will they. I doubt they'll judge you unless you judge them first. They'll be looking to you, as a current Xuelhuala General, for leadership, they're in a new world, and they'll trust you to show them what it is."

Sonivale still wasn't responding, but Rahkesh thought he'd gotten the point across, so he left quickly, walking slowly back to the room he'd been assigned. Sonivale didn't say anything, but Rahkesh reached the doors to his rooms before the young General moved from where Rahkesh had left him.

"Nicely done." Daray said softly as Rahkesh closed the door behind him.

"That was rude." Rahkesh said as the eavesdropping spells vanished from his shirt, but he was grinning and both vampires just rolled their eyes.

"Such an inspiring speech," Silas sighed, wiping his tearless eyes. "Heart warming, I'm all inspired to be good and friendly now."

"Sarcasm can drown you know." Rahkesh drawled back at him.

"Good thing I'm already dead." Silas smirked. "Tomorrow then?"

"Tomorrow." Rahkesh agreed.

"Ah, Rahkesh…you have considered that Nic isn't going to be the same person we knew, right?" Daray asked.

"Of course. Twenty-something years ought to do that." Rahkesh said, "Somehow that doesn't concern me at all. In fact I expect him to be fairly predictably Nicodemus. He was already one of the Xuelhuala long before he physically joined them. I expect little change in him, really." The vampires looked doubtful, but Rahkesh felt completely comfortable with his prediction, and he _always_ trusted his instincts, whatever guided them had never yet failed him.

"If you say so." Silas finally said.

Rahkesh packed away the necromancy book he'd been reading, in preparation for their next lesson. "I'm off to bed; I expect we'll be busy tomorrow."

"When are we not busy?" Daray asked dryly, "goodnight."

XX

Rahkesh woke slowly, which was extremely unusual for him as he usually became fully awake instantly. There was someone in the room with him, but this didn't really bother him. Even the vampires made him wake up instantly and check the locations of his weapons, and they were his friends. This person didn't bother him. Why not…Rahkesh smelled the air without opening his eyes, and recognized the person instantly…okay then, that was expected. A finger lightly trailed over the point on his forehead where his lighting bolt scar had once been, and he knew he'd never told either vampire about that. But he had told someone else. He opened his eyes as the hand vanished.

Nicodemus was sitting in the one chair in the room, leaning it back precariously on two legs so he could rest against the wall beside Rahkesh's bed. Rahkesh's first thought was that he hadn't changed his haircut in over a thousand years – still the same brown-blond that went so dark in the shade it looked black, still tied back with a string of tiny yellow feathers. His next thought was that Nic had grown a bit, and wasn't that odd since he'd only been a year younger than Rahkesh? And damn but it was good to see him again, Rahkesh had missed his Chachapoyaroan friend.

Rahkesh grinned a little and rolled over onto his side, quickly switching to the ancient Chachapoyaro language. "Long time no see," he said with a small grin, using a phrase Daray had introduced Nic to that Nic hated.

Nic blinked once then frowned a little. Rahkesh recalled he was probably thirty-eight. Looked about ten years younger (not that Rahkesh knew the Chachapoyaro lifespan or how they aged at all) about as tall as Rahkesh now, though still not as broad. A couple new scars, faint ones, and one raised white line all the way down the outside of his right forearm. He was wearing the enchanted necklace Rahkesh given him; a snake made of copper thread. It was covered in tiny emerald bits that were each edged in copper, giving it the appearance of a shimmering green and copper snake.

Nic smiled suddenly, as if remembering something. "Very funny, I checked to make sure the Ateres menaces were still asleep before coming in here."

"You got into their rooms without waking them? I'll remember to gloat for a week." Rahkesh joked.

"Got into this room too," Nic pointed out with just a little smugness.

"That doesn't surprise me." Rahkesh said sitting upright cross-legged on the bed. "Given that there's some magical connection between us, that you didn't explain very well, as mentioned in your letter." Nicodemus's second letter, hidden in the painting he'd given Rahkesh, had not been clear at all, except that at some point a magical connection of some sort had somehow become established between them, and at the time of his writing the letter the Xuelhuala hadn't figured it out yet.

"We did figure that out," Nicodemus said with grimace, looking away. Rahkesh sighed and wondered if it was too early to go "liberate" the small bottle of fire whiskey he knew Silas had packed. That grimace meant Nic was uncomfortable.

"Go on."

"Do you remember what happened to you after you went and drank Enireth's blood?"

"Unfortunately, I think I'd rather forget." Rahkesh said, grimacing, remembering a level of agony he hadn't known existed.

"The state you were in I'm surprised you remember at all."

"Everything until I passed out."

"Well, Daray and I found you and Sharahak there. Dragon blood, raw, is usually lethal to vampires if it even gets in a cut, and for young ones just touching it will kill them. Daray looked after Sharahak while I tried to help you. You were covered in weird magic, open gashes, vomit, and there was blood everywhere. I had open cuts inside my left arm from some of our trap building, the ones we made to kill the Inca. Some of your blood, laced with Enireth's blood, went straight into my cuts." Nic twisted his right arm and showed Rahkesh six small white scars just inside the elbow, they were white, but oddly shiny. Rahkesh, acting on impulse, touched one, the shock that sparked made them both wince.

"That dragon's blood still hasn't finished with me." Rahkesh said softly, examining his fingers. "I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else that's happened because I did that."

"What's happened?" Nic asked.

"Never mind right now. What's this connection entail?"

"Nothing. Well, maybe nothing. It was hard to test any hypothesis, what with a thousand years time difference. As far as anyone can tell it's just a far exaggerated awareness of each other's presence. Probably we can determine each other's health long distance…when we exist in the same time. We're not sure what else." Nic said, shrugging.

"I knew you were here when I woke up. And I knew you were here before I woke up, which is why I didn't pull a knife out when you walked in." Rahkesh said. "I think your researchers missed something very important. You remember that vision, the one you wrote to me about?"

"Yes, it was very unusual."

"I had the same vision; I saw all of that, the exact same way, _before_ I got your letter." Rahkesh said, watching Nic's eyes widen.

"We did not anticipate that." Nic said softly. "That is interesting. Have you had any other visions?"

"Not really, no."

"Neither have I, but it is odd indeed that we shared that one." Nic said. Rahkesh reached out and took Nic's hands, then closed his eyes and began searching for his memory of that terrifying vision.

_Screams, intense breathless endless screaming. Rahkesh snarled and the thunderbird rocked and woke, ready to fight. The screaming was getting louder, and Rahkesh could hear the beat of wings. Fire raced across his vision and black smoke wafted through his nostrils. It hurt, the death stink on the hot air. Charred flesh and boiling blood. _

_A cobblestone street emerged, rivers of red blood running down the gutters, blood splashed across empty doorways and shattered windows. The homes were abandoned, a ghost town dripping blood from windowsills and gaping holes in burning rooftops. Blood on the tree trunks, blood smeared on doors and running down front steps, dripping from gutters and turning street-side flowerbeds into red squishy marshes. Bits of flesh, skin and intestines, were smeared over hedges and hung off railings. Claw marks raked down the sides of the buildings, huge gouges through the wood and stone. A human arm lay, detached from its owner, carelessly flung upon a staircase. _

_People were screaming, individuals now, shrieks of terror and the moans of the dying. He loved this, the blood, the rich stink of fear, bloodlust raced through his veins and he roared, calling his flock to another kill. Wait…he didn't like this…why was he feeling this way? These were not his feelings. He was watching through another person's emotions and eyes? That would involve a real connection…was he feeling these things from the magic surrounding him then? _

_The sky was red, red with fire and fear, and the flames reflected off the underside of the black clouds of smoke. The blood tasted good, smelled good too, he wanted more of it. No he didn't, the others did. Rahkesh fought to untangle his mind from what he was sensing, but collapsed under the overwhelming emotions and blood thirst, the drive to destroy and conquer that was so thick he felt like he was drowning in an ocean of war. Wings beat through the air and shrieks of triumph sounded overhead. Magic lashed out; flowing through the streets, the remaining windows shattered and the screams were engulfed in magic. Then they went silent. _

Nic made a sound in the back of his throat as his eyes snapped open. "That was unpleasant."

"My memory..."

"The same as mine." Nic said, squeezing Rahkesh's hands. "I wonder whose it was first? Did I send it to you, or you to me?"

"Anything else?"

"I don't know if it's really related…" Nic started, then shrugged.

"Go on."

"Chachapoyaro do not normally form connections with animals…familiars I believe you called them. You told me that they were rare among the species in your world, and that you and the two vampires were unusual since all three of you had familiars. As it stands, though I have not checked what has happened since my time, I am the first Chachapoyaro to form such a connection with a magical animal. Magical though Enireth might be, he is still an animal."

"Enireth!"

Nic grinned and turned, tugging Rahkesh along with him. Rahkesh looked over at the window just in time to see a massive scaled head dip down from outside and a huge eye blinked at him. Rahkesh focused, and found that he could no longer feel Enireth's mind.

"I can feel you doing that." Nic said suddenly, "so can he. Enireth seems to have telepathic abilities, even though dragons aren't supposed to be able to do that. So it might be him. But your familiar is also reptilian."

"I can't sense him."

"He's still a little woozy from the timeless-spell."

"And he's become very attached to you, which might protect him from anyone else getting into his mind."

"Possibly."

"Did your sorcerers come up with anything else?"

"Whatever this connection is, it's permanent." Nicodemus said, shifting a little. Rahkesh raised an eyebrow at his discomfort.

"Do you mind?"

"What? No." Nic said quickly, startled, "I was more worried _you'd _be the one upset about that. If you are not aware Rahkesh, you're a rather independent creature."

"Ahh, yeah, a little." Rahkesh said slowly with a sheepish grin. _Ferociously independent more like, and just about suicidal if I don't have complete control of myself._ His reaction to having his mind read or controlled showed _that_ rather clearly.

Nicodemus was waiting, a little warily, for a response. "One of our sorcerers said that he thought it felt like the magical connection Chachapoyaro siblings sometime create, which tend to remove themselves, so this may not last." He sounded like he was trying to reassure Rahkesh. Rahkesh didn't need to be reassured about that. A not-so-strong connection with Nicodemus did not bother him at all, though he felt it probably should have; anyone else and it would have. There would be questions, but, if, as he suspected, Nicodemus was the one keeping Enireth blocked, this would be an added advantage to Rahkesh. That was enough to justify being okay with this link to most of those he knew at Akren. But Rahkesh didn't need their approval; he refused to seek anyone's approval or rely on anyone for it.

"Did I ever tell you I always wished I'd had a brother?" Rahkesh asked, grinning.

XXX

Hanashi stalked out of the classroom, black boots clicking softly against the stone floor. Haedil appeared a few moments later and caught up with her. Up ahead a crowd of young Amadan fae was emerging from a classroom, and they jumped aside, eyes wide, as the two black-clad Akren students strode past. Small startled eyes fixed on the Akren crests displayed on their shoulders, booths, and weapon sheaths. Getting into Akren was the goal of just about every young Amadan, and the sight of two of the current Amadan students at Akren in the hallways caused an instant silence. Since being noticed was part of why they were there, this was just something to be ignored.

Down the end of the hall the classroom doors were open, and inside every room classes of twenty children, ages six to eighteen, were going through weapons training. The Amadan were one of the most visible fae species – they didn't hide out in secret communities like many of the other races. The lack of such extreme isolation had produced a slightly less violent culture. And while three years training in self-defense was a requirement in their education system they were not known for extreme violence like the Vascari were.

With a demon invasion looming the Amadan leaders had agreed to change all education to what would be useful during war. While this included most magical training it was directed at using skills like transfiguration in battle. In this the creativity of children was a bonus, even though they didn't have the magic to do much. With the invasion expected to start in a few weeks all schooling had changed to solely weapons practice. As part of a plan to keep the children motivated while helping them to feel safer (a lie but a worthwhile one) some of the current crop of Amadan attending Akren had been asked to come home for a day. Neither Hanashi nor Haedil particularly wanted to be back at their childhood school when they could be training, but their Headmistress had agreed to send them.

An ocean away Severus Snape was also displeased, for the same reason. He had been sent back to _his_ childhood school to help the remaining staff prepare the buildings to be used as a refuge during war. The UK was about the last place one Earth he wanted to be; far too many memories, few of which were good. And a good portion of the population hated him, even though he'd been "officially" pardoned for Albus Dumbledore's death. This meant precisely nothing given that the current government was in shreds and not even barely legitimate, having failed to meet any of the necessary requirements to be so. No one cared. They had a Minister – Amelia Bones had survived Azkaban long enough to be released, and she seemed entirely sane. And Kingsley Shacklebolt was back as the head of the aurors, with Tonks aiding him. One out of every hundred Ministry workers from a year previous was still alive. The general population had suffered an even larger population loss, with one out of every hundred and fifty left alive.

Minerva McGonagall was waiting at the doors, a Cheshire smirk that would have shocked her students speechless on her face as she watched her former colleague, accompanied by six other defense experts, stalk up the path.

"I always did like the bat look." Minerva sighed as Severus stopped beside her.

"Hng."

"Articulate as always."

"We are wasting time."

"Did you enjoy working with the Aussies for a week?" Minerva asked. Severus had spent all of twenty-four hours recovering from his ordeal before storming off to join some secret potions-masters-only project doing something "useful".

"No."

"I thought not; most of _their_ potions masters know how to smile. Must have been terrible. Do you need to see Pomfrey?" Minerva asked, she always enjoyed baiting her sour colleague.

"Do you? One should always be careful with mind altering substances." He'd sent her his usual birthday gift of a catnip mouse.

"She's busy with Mrs. Norris, old lady got into my stash." Minerva said with an evil smirk Voldemort would have envied. Then the other defense experts arrived and Severus quit speaking civil English.

"How many students do you have at this time?" The team leader, Rodriguez, asked.

"Forty, total." Headmistress McGonagal replied, far below what the school had ever had before. The building felt empty and they hardly needed the Houses anymore, what with only six Hufflepuffs and eight Gryffindors. The last few years of war and plague had resulted in not a single new Hufflepuff that year, and the Gryffindor rash bravery had resulted in far too many dying helping family during the plague. However the Ravenclaws had survived better than any of the others, demonstrating how the very real personality differences between the Houses worked. _Which does nothing to explain Harry…Rahkesh now._ Minerva thought, she often wondered about her favorite student, though he was certainly doing well enough for himself at Akren. Which said a lot about Albus's judgment, lack of it, for hating that school for being dark. She'd heard many a tirade from his portrait on that topic, though the shouting was mostly over and now he just sat their looking angry and hurt.

The forty students took notice of the defense experts working all over the castle, and whispered in fear; they had learned by brutal experience that new things were not exciting. But no one noticed the return of their old potions teacher.

Severus Snape was somewhere no one would have ever looked for him; a girls bathroom. Specifically the one Moaning Myrtle inhabited, though she'd been petrified with a very dark spell upon his arrival. From his robe pocket he let Siraka out – Mad Eye Moody had sent him the snake, supposedly from Harry Potter. As guaranteed she moved at once to the correct sink faucet, and hissed at it. It responded just as well to a snake as to a human, and the Chamber of Secrets opened beside him.

Hogwarts was the most secure place in Britain, and it was big. With so much empty space there was room to store supplies for years, and so this would be the only refuge available. But even refuges needed secret hiding spots, for valuable things or people. And the demons probably didn't know what parselmagic was. The Chamber, and the Room of Requirement, would both be put to uses he was sure none of the Founders had ever considered. But first they needed secure warding, and violent protective magics.

XX

"How much of a sleeping spell did you put on the vampires?" Rahkesh asked. Nicodemus and Rahkesh were walking the streets of Xariath, just talking, though Nic had little to say about his training to become a General. It was very early and the streets were empty. The revived army was resting and recovering, as were those who had revived them. Rahkesh's appreciation of the Xariath architecture had risen to whole new levels. The city was truly beautiful, and dangerous. Oddly he felt very much at home here, in a place built by another species.

"Enough." Nic said, smirking. "Do you suppose they'll be terribly angry?"

"No. But I'd be careful what you eat or drink for the next month. And beware of anything with fangs." Rahkesh said, "or you'll wind up with orange hair that you have to grow out because the color change is permanent."

"Orange is okay." Nic said after a moment's reflection. "My enemies will be too blinded by how horrible it looks on me to actual defend themselves." He grinning in as diabolical a manner as he could manage, which wasn't very.

"Tell that to Daray. He'd probably believe it enough to color himself pink."

"Pink is not the color of a vampire." Nic intoned in a perfect imitation of Daray's voice.

"Urgh." Rahkesh grimaced while laughing. From the wall top above their heads came a soft clatter of hooves as four guards raced their unicorns along the road that led atop the walls, testing the magics on them as they went The splashes of color rippled down the walls to the ground.

"Did they let you watch when they brought Xariath back?" Nic asked.

"Yes. It was amazing; I've never seen musical enchantments before."

"Are they uncommon in your world?"

"Your world now too Nic. And musical enchantments are very rare."

"Right, I suppose we'll all have to get used to that. It'll be easier for the older of us – when I was alive we weren't so totally separate from the rest of the world."

"Perhaps if you had a species-identity it would help."

"It would, but Chachapoyaroan is a bit of a mouthful."

"And your names aren't?" Rahkesh asked, incredulous. Nic grinned sheepishly.

"Not all of them."

"Okay, yours isn't, not anymore than mine anyway. And I guess Sonivale isn't much. But Kalahimran?"

"Sonivale…I remember that one. Glared at us the whole time they were telling us why we had been brought back." Nic said, frowning.

"I talked to him last night. You should find him more reasonable today." Rahkesh said. Then he had to explain his brief conversation with the young General. Nic listening, looking concerned.

"That was rather well done." Nic finally said, "and I suspect you were correct."

"Did you notice anything else about Sonivale?" Rahkesh asked gently.

"No?" Nic asked curiously.

"Nothing about how he looks like your almost-twin, but ten years younger?" Rahkesh asked – Sonivale's rounder face looked younger.

"Uh, no."

"He could very well be one of your descendents." Rahkesh said, suspecting that Nic hadn't considered that he'd be living now with his own descendents. Nic didn't think that far long term into consequences very well, so he probably hadn't ever considered it before agreeing to join the time-frozen army.

"I hadn't thought of that." Nic said softly, confirming Rahkesh's suspicion. "You know the Xuelhuala and Xaiaxelo require their warriors to reproduce, at least one child each, more for the best warriors, and it's preferred if the other parent is also a warrior or somebody with an equal level of magical power or intelligence."

"I know that." Rahkehs said, not hiding his distaste. The Chachapoyaro breeding regulations would have started a bloody revolt in any other sentient species alive. And personally he didn't like the idea, though he supposed, since he wasn't having children anyway, it was none of his concern. And the Chachapoyaro seemed content with their system. Rahkesh had checked out their library for a brief idea of what had been happening here. They'd had more political upheaval in the decade it took to end the enslavement of those who attacked them (the warrior cities had kept prisoners as slaves) then they'd had over eugenics in their entire history. "Almost seems like a punishment."

"More of a forced vacation with a good friend – they usually require both partners to take time off until the birth. Probably a good idea, we're rather intense people so perhaps a forced vacation at least once every five or ten years is a good thing. The women usually just magically arrange for fraternal triplets, easier that way. Anyway I have, well I had, six children."

"Wouldn't it be funny if some of them also joined Xariath, and were older than you?" Rahkesh said, snickering as Nicodemus actually paused midstep to blink rather hard at that thought. "Or if they outrank you now?" Rahkesh added, laughing at Nic's discomfort at that idea.

"You mentioned that Enireth's blood had caused some side effects." Nicodemus said quickly, clearing his throat. Rahkesh's let the subject change go. Nic needed to go look at the genealogy records.

"Yes. There were some rather amazing side effects." Rahkesh said. Glancing around he saw no one watching, so he stopped in the shade of a tower and held out a hand, closing his eyes. Nic took it warily. Rahkesh opened his eyes and stared straight at Nic, and let the thunderbird rise within him. From staring a mirror he knew what would happen. Wild dancing lightning and rolling black clouds floated across his irises, then his pupils. Rahkesh lost sight of Nic and descended into the storm floating within his mind.

Nicodemus gasped softly as Rahkesh's irises expanded, removing the whites of his eyes. Magic flared in lightning bolts over Rahkesh's eyes and storms clouds billowed as though he were within a massive storm. Through his hand Rahkesh's magic leaped across and poured into Nic's mind. And in his mind a bird of lightning unfolded its wings, thunder rumbled, light flashed and the bird soared through the storm, lightning flying off its feathers. The thunderbird turned its head and a shining emerald eye winked at him.

The vision vanished, and Rahkesh's magic with it. Nic steadied himself against a wall as Rahkesh pulled in his animagus, his soul.

"What was that?"

"I explained animagi to you."

"Animagi…yes…animals that reflect the mind or the soul."

"That, Nicodemus, _was my soul_." Rahkesh said quietly. His eyes had returned to normal, but the thunderbird was who he was, and so his normal state these days was to have an endless thunderstorm in the irises of his eyes. He had to consciously focus to make it go back to black and gold, though the emerald green also felt fairly normal. But the storm was who he was.

"Your animagus reflects your soul."

"Yes. It's a thunderbird."

"And what is a thunderbird?"

In answer Rahkesh stepped closer and placed one hand on each of Nic's temples. Leaning his forehead against Nic's, Rahkesh sought out the raging defiance and power, and slowly dropped all of his shields. Somehow, though he did not understand, this was easier with Nic than with anyone else. Probably that link.

A half hour later the sun crossed the mountaintops and beams of light flew across Rahkesh's face, waking him. Rahkesh straightened, dropping his hands. Nic, reeling, dropped down to sit on the stone steps outside a doorway. Rahkesh, concerned sat down next to him, waiting for some sort of reaction.

"Well…that's hardly surprising. It suits you." Nic finally said, shaking his head to clear it.

"Enireth blood didn't create it. I was already a thunderbird. His blood just hastened its full awakening."

"Is it difficult? Having to know your soul?" Nic asked.

"Were you always so astute?" Rahkesh asked, rhetorically. "Yes. I know my strengths, my faults…all of them. That doesn't' change them, I just have to acknowledge them. I can still be as petty as I wish, I just can't not acknowledge that it's intentional."

"What a loss." Nic said, and to Rahkesh he didn't sound sarcastic.

"It's difficult at times. But I wouldn't trade knowing my soul for anything. I am a thunderbird and…that makes me feel secure. Because I can predict and control myself. I suppose I am control freak then aren't I? Maybe a little. But the freedom…the freedom of being in my thunderbird form. There's nothing like that Nic. Nothing."

XX

"Will you be able to formally introduce us?" Nicodemus asked.

"Everything is already being arranged, there will be no problem with that." Rahkesh assured the assembled Xariath, Xuelhuala and Xaiaxelo Generals. There were forty-eight of them at the small gathering. It was fairly informal in the Chachapoyaro style; lots of people sitting around a larger room on cushions and low padded chairs of woven branches, with fresh fruit and fruit juices everywhere in silver or gold platters and gem encrusted goblets. The Xariath meeting hall was just down the hall, this was a smaller room, and several hundred pounds of gold and rubies built into a massive sun across an entire wall.

"We three are recognized by the Magical Life Forms Conclave. We have presented before them on our knowledge of demons and they were notified to anticipate your arrival. They'll be ready to assemble whenever you're ready." Daray explained.

"Sooner rather than later. We have a war to fight." Nicodemus said softly, though everyone heard him. Rahkesh was coming to see that Nic commanded immense respect from his peers – everyone got silent as soon as he spoke, though he was short on words.

Following his conversation with Rahkesh that morning Nic had left to wake his command and put them through a three hour morning practice that hadn't held anything back for their centuries of inactivity. The magics had indeed preserved them perfectly, and Rahkesh had heard no complaints from the warriors over their training session. In an hour warriors from the other cities had shown up to go through their own routine exercises and to arrange for combat practice and join training later. Everyone present was a professional fighter, and they acted like it.

"Tomorrow?" Sonivale asked.

"We've already decided that we will build a proper pathway to the outer world. But that can wait. Our civilians are interested in visiting the rest of the world, but not until they have learned a few languages. And we will not yet allow complete strangers here. Not until we figure out how we'd house them. There is much work to be done but that is the work of the cities and they say they do not need guidance." One of the Xaiaxelo Generals, a yellow-eyed woman, explained.

"We'll have regiments waiting for when, or if, we decided to let any foreigners in." Sonivale said.

"And we will take only a small force with us when we go to meet with the other world leaders. Our cities are in no danger at the moment." Another Xaiaxelo General said.

"They will be in danger if our warriors are not ready to work with the rest of the world when the demons arrive. And if we do not have a joint battle plan prepared." Nicodemus said, bringing everyone back to the real subject. "If we meet with the MLFC tomorrow we can dispense with formalities and get down to comparing capabilities and fighter positions by tomorrow evening."

"We have already finished our own inventory; we know what we are capable of. Now we need to discuss this with our new allies." One of the Xuelhuala Generals said.

"Tomorrow then?" Rahkesh asked. The agreement was one hundred percent. The Chachapoyaro warriors didn't mess about much. With their cities already secure there was nothing to hold them back and Rahkesh suspected they would demand similar speedy decision making from the MLFC. The politicians would be upset. But they were not relevant to fighting this war anyway.

As the group broke into many smaller conversations Daray appeared silently beside Rahkesh. "Namach and Grandmother are going to just _love_ these guys."

"The demons won't" Silas said, fangs sparkling.

XX

"I hope Headmistress Alefly was able to warn everyone in time." Rahkesh said as he fell into step beside Mrs. Stocklir, "we didn't give her much time."

"Oh she warned everyone, and had a fun time doing it." Stocklir replied dryly. "I love you Akren types, you think it's perfectly acceptable to get up in front of the entire MLFC and say "about a year ago three of our first year students went a thousand years back in time and…and now that the demons are invading we sent those same three students back as ambassadors _for the world_ to warn the Chachapoyaro and to bring them back to the world. This will also entail the awaken of a _massive_ army frozen in time for a _thousand years, _collected by the Xuelhuala warriors _precisely_ to fight a war such as this." And then she just smiled at us all, like it was completely ordinary for three eighteen year olds to be the world's ambassadors to a long-lost civilization with the largest army ever built. It was fantastic. The Fae Council think we humans are out of our minds because of that speech, well, certainly they think Nvara is nuttier than a bag of pistachios."

"I'm sure she has her own opinion of them." Rahkesh said, trying not to sound too amused. He really liked the Akren Headmistress, she certainly had style.

"Well, the new Fae Council thinks rather highly of her, so no problems there." Stocklir said.

"We're doing all the negotiating today with just fighters?" Rahkesh asked.

"Tactical commanders." Stocklir corrected. "The politicians just get to watch."

"Oooh. I can hear the whining from here." Rahkesh snickered. Stocklir grinned in a wolfish fashion that looked out of place on her grandmotherly face.

"Not too much of that. When the situation is truly dire even politicians can shut up. They can even get along." Stocklir said.

"Uh huh."

"Who's doing the introductions?"

"Daray. He has the formal protocol training to do it right. Really that's not terribly necessary but I think the Chachapoyaro are nervous, a little."

"That's why we're holding this in the garden halls, not the auditorium." Stocklir explained. The garden halls all had many huge archways that opened down a few steps directly into some amazing gardens. There was plenty of space, good acoustics so everyone could hear, but no set plan and everyone could mingle.

"That's a very good idea." Rahkesh agreed.

"I try." Stocklir said. "The worst part is the historians."

"The what?"

"The historians. This is an unknown species joining a world they separated from a thousand or more years ago. History in the making and the historians ALL wanted to be here."

Rahkesh walked the rest of the way to the gardens annoyed and worrying. He'd left fame behind only to get even more famous, and now every historian alive wanted to meet his friends. Somehow this wasn't what he'd been looking for when he'd left Hogwarts.

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Review Please

So another new form of magic, music. No Rahkesh is not going to learn this too, I'm not musically talented enough to come up with more than this, I know nothing about music.


	27. Chapter 27

I was going to reply to reviews, but then I realized that it would take a whole chapter in and of itself! Just know that I read all reviews multiple times and appreciate them all. Though reviews don't influence my plot any so you can beg for your favorite pairing, it won't happen, sorry. Still, I like hearing what readers are thinking.

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A bit of technical information – each bloodmagic ritual is also called a "piece". Groups of rituals with the same purpose that build off each other to create an eventual full effect are all pieces. The final result is called a "set". For example; the lowest level stamina improvement "set" contains three "pieces"(or individual rituals). They build off each other and are very similar. The second level of stamina enhancing bloodmagics is another "set" containing four "pieces"(rituals) that build off each other but are different from the lower level stamina set, though they do link because the purposes are related.

Woohoo! Someone guessed what Rahkesh is turning into! The hints are all there, have been for a long time, it's good it was finally guessed by a few people.

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Chapter 27

He should have warned them, he really should have. Had he been thinking clearly he would have. But he hadn't, and so Rahkesh just had to give a sheepish shrug when Nicodemus glared at him as what seemed like every reporter in the world snapped photos simultaneously. Focusing hard Rahkesh sent a tiny apologetic thought and got a lifted eyebrow in response. Oh dear. This was not going well.

_I am so kicking your sorry ass in our training duels_. Rahkesh let the thought from Nicodemus into his mind without really thinking about it. Interesting. Telepathy? No, more like a lack of aversion to the mental contact. Everyone reacted to having a though slipped into their mind, and had Rahkesh not been so well self-controlled (he had to be) he would have reacted. Heck a year ago he would have attacked, but with gaining a constant connection of his two animals forms had come a much greater level of self control, and so he noticed the magic before it contacted his and allowed the thought in. But neither animal form so much as stirred, and they woke up even when Daray was around (which was justified since he regularly left alligators in the bathtub or some such). Still he couldn't ignore the possibility that this mysterious link had helped. They hadn't considered that either. So maybe the Chachapoyaro warrior/sorcerers weren't so terribly clever after all. Or a thousand years time displacement actually mattered. Or maybe it was just them.

The reporters didn't seem aware that no one had told their newest allies that killing was not an acceptable form of diplomatic entertainment, and several of the visitors were looking like they were just barely keeping themselves from breaking someone's neck. Fortunately their strange gold-ish skin and natural defensiveness seemed to keep the Chachapoyaro from expressing their outrage in an easily detectable manner. Rahkesh however could tell that Nicodemus really was almost ready to hurt someone. But they had an image to keep as the Chachapoyaro representatives, and so the warriors selected as representatives managed to remain impassive. They also gave no sign of enjoying the attention. Perhaps using warriors as diplomats sometimes worked. Rahkesh stifled a yawn; following the morning meeting back the Chachapoyaro homeland they had spent the entire day and night explaining things to the Chachapoyaro. It was mid morning now and it had been a little over twenty-four hours since he'd slept.

Among the swarms of people the Xariath warriors stood out as different. Their gold skin and bright eyes were only part of it, really it was their choice of clothing; they dressed head to toe in black, red, bone-cream and tiger-eye stones and silver bird feathers worked into feather magic. More than half of every species present represented some military or other, and so wore uniforms, but nothing like the battle clothes the Xariath were showing. Not exactly armor, but almost. Rahkesh knew from watching Nicodemus get ready to come to the meeting that their clothes could turn into armor more or less instantly. They hadn't brought any visible weapons, thinking it would be an insult, but the glowing gems and feathers were pulsing with magic. The Chachapoyaro warriors didn't bother with diplomatic garb, they wore their finest battle gear that wasn't quite armor, not even the Vascari fae, the most war-like species, were doing that.

"We got the historians out and then _this_ mob came pounding on the doors." Rahkesh turned to find Minister Yi of South Korea beside him.

"Do you suppose they'd believe us if we said these disgusting creatures were merely another species all their own, and the flashes of light just their primary communication method?" Rahkesh asked. Laughter sounded from his other side and he looked to his left to find Amelia Bones on his other side. Now why did he feel ambushed between these two?

"Better to get it over with." Minister Bones said gently.

"Better to not have to. I bet we could probably persuade the reporters that in order to understand the Chachapoyaro thoroughly and accurately, for their readers benefit, they should undertake a training course with the Chachapoyaroan warriors." Rahkesh said. "We would have fewer reporters to deal with after that I should think."

"Perhaps we can convince Stocklir to suggest it." Minister Yi said, grinning into a glass of fruit punch. _Spiked_ Sygra hissed into Rahkesh's ear. _Silas._ Well that figured, and Daray would try to put entirely-to-innocent-looking mushrooms in the salad. And then both would be back at the Ateres fortress when anyone found out. It must be nice, to have that sort of refuge. Neither vampire had to worry about much, aside from offending their grandmother.

"How was your trip?" Minister of Magic Bones asked.

"A bit of a vacation really. With the Akren training schedule the three of us rather needed it." Rahkesh admitted honestly. And his right hand was throbbing, the lightning-like scars painful inside the black glove he was wearing to hide them. The gloves had spells worked into them in threadmagic, and the healing magic was directed at magic-induced damage and worked by smoothing magical flows around damaged areas. They were the work of an Akren alumnus living in Jamaica and were worth the amazing cost. And even with all that the gloves were doing the pain from his injuries had been getting steadily worse. Whatever benefit he'd gotten by letting the remains of the phoenix feather become a part of him had not lasted long enough. Perhaps the phoenix feather had even been blocking some of the effects of the rest of the wand remains. Rahkesh knew he needed a solution to getting rid of the remains of the wood soon, very soon. His magical restrictions made him vulnerable and he didn't like it one bit.

"You've seen these people fight, how would you compare them to, say, the UK aurors?" Minister Bones asked.

"Your government still has aurors?" Rahkesh couldn't stop himself from asking. "I never saw them fight, or train to really, so I wouldn't know."

"You were born there though correct?" Rahkesh went on guard, without giving any outward sign. How much did Amelia Bones know? Moody would not have said a word without Rahkesh's go-ahead. Tonk and Kingsley had sworn a magical oath to say nothing. McGonagal however had not. Though she was bound by an Order of the Phoenix oath.

"Yes. And I stayed well outside of most of the society for my childhood. Not that children observe much. I left as soon as I was old enough to travel internationally alone." Rahkesh said, guessing that she had not connected Harry Potter, who she knew was at Akren, with Rahkesh Asmodaeus. Besides, he'd covered himself very well by having them both be publicly visible for Voldemort's demise. "They are trained to a fine level, by Akren standards." That was a safe response. An Akren student or graduate could always compare something to Akren standards, better or worse, and say everything that needed saying without anyone knowing exactly what the Akren standards were.

"Is it true this civilization has no currency?" Minister Yi asked. Rahkesh had to pause and think about that. During his previous visit the Chachapoyaro system hadn't had any such thing, but he didn't think that was true any longer and hadn't been there long enough to really know.

"I do not know. They did not have any such system a thousand years ago, but I was not there long enough to ask about such changes." Rahkesh finally answered.

"Well, at least with their warriors the demons will at least have to expend most of their fighting power to win." Minister Yi observed.

"Do you ever get the feeling we're going about fighting this war the wrong way?" Rahkesh asked.

"No. What else would we do?" Minister Bones asked curiously.

"I don't know. It's just a feeling that there must be another way. You know, with all the piece of this world that have been copied and/or removed why do we need all these secure bunkers? Who thought it would be easier to do that than to better defend those magically removed areas?" Rahkesh asked a question he had been wondering about for some time.

"It was considered, but those pieces all have edges, and the wards could be worn down." Minister Bones explained.

"I still can't help but wonder if tactically we're doing this all wrong. We're still assuming big battles and all-out assaults. Could there be another way to win this?"

"If you come up with something, please, tell us." Minister Yi said, "I want my son to live long enough to give me grandchildren." A second later a few of the Xaiaxelo Generals, escorted by diplomats chosen by Stocklir, showed up to meet the Ministers and Rahkesh found himself quickly going through introductions and only barely remembering the names of these three Generals. Sensing a signal from Nicodemus Rahkesh slipped away moments later to go find his friend. The Chachapoyaro did not have real diplomats and the Generals were being very patient for the moment.

Nicodemus was with four other Generals and Rahkesh was not surprised to see they'd found people with a similar profession: four humans (all probably Generals from one country or another), the Commander of a Vascari fae regiment, an alpha werewolf, Viare the centaur, and a female Vashora he didn't recognize but who was wearing some sort of gold marking across both shoulders. As Rahkesh arrived Nic turned to him, wearing the traditional Xariath clothing he looked far more like a General, and quite a bit older, and the lack of visible weapons did nothing to disguise what he was.

"Cameras." Nic stated as Rahkesh arrived at his shoulder. "Are they dangerous or were they invented by an evil demon?" Rahkesh noted that whatever language magics the Chachapoyaro used must be very advanced. In a little more than twenty-four hours the Chachapoyaro had a good grasp of English. The others still struggled a little, but Nic (and another General six hundred years younger who had explored the outside world) had it nearly perfected. These Generals had been chosen for their positions in their respective hierarchies, and for their linguistic abilities, which mixed well with whatever spells or potions they were using.

"They just copy an image. The lights…well I'm sure you could get around that magically but that wouldn't blind and disorient the subject. Doing that makes you more vulnerable when they start asking questions."

"And no one has murdered those miserable wretches?"

"When we have more time I'll explain." Rahkesh sighed, a free press was a good thing but whatever reporter school most of them attended did not include a class in common decency or manners.

"Stocklir explained just fine. I don't understand why everyone thinks this is a good thing. Why not just publish whatever people send in?"

"What if no one sends in anything interesting?"

"Then the world must be boring. But that's just general news. This is politics. Why not just let everyone's different leaders tell them what's going on?"

"You Chachapoyaro trust your government. There are very few humans who do the same." Rahkesh said simply.

"Then why not get a better government you can trust?" Nic asked with typical Chachapoyaroan problem solving mindset.

"Not that easy when we all disagree."

"Then teach everyone the right way so they don't disagree. This is not difficult."

"It is if no one agrees what 'the right way' is." Rahkesh said tiredly. Nic looked like he was going to respond but stopped when one of the others elbowed him and tilted his head. Several vampires were approaching, working their way through the crowds. Rahkesh glanced at them and leaned forward and spoke so the Chachapoyaro could all hear. "Center is Tristan Namach, Lord of the Vampires but don't call him that. Left is Vladimir Konovalov, Lord of Moscow. They're both pretty decent fellows and very good fighters. The third I don't know but I'd be wary of that one." He drifted back a bit as the vampires got through the crowd (Namach must have done something, the people moved apart instantly). Daray instantly began introducing everyone and Rahkesh moved around to stand near his friend. The Chachapoyaro didn't shake hands, and the vampires just offered friendly fanged smiles.

"The last time I met one of your species was two thousand years ago. I'll admit at the time your insistence of keeping away from everyone seemed a little odd, but it appears to have worked very well indeed." Namach said smoothly in the ancient Chachapoyaroan language. An older version than what Rahkesh spoke, though he could understand it clearly. Apparently so could one of the Xariath Generals who had joined their sleeping army long before Nicodemus had. The man's eyes got about as wide as saucers.

Rahkesh and Daray managed not to react, though Rahkesh wanted to hit his teacher. He knew the Chachapoyaro? Since when?

Namach turned to Rahkesh, smiling gently, though the sparkle in his undead eyes was decidedly diabolical and smug. "Rahkesh our ally Sharahak should be here soon. I had to pull him out of some delicate meditations to get here, and it seems he will still be late. Would you escort him in?" By Namach's voice that was not an actual question. "The reporters are leaving and you've seen how they get around him." The vampire turned away, assuming Rahkesh would do what he was told, still appearing amused as he greeted one of the humans. Rahkesh was suspicious. It was entirely too convenient to send him away now, while Namach talked with the Chachapoyaro. But he didn't have much of choice so Rahkesh gave no sign of his unease, and left.

Dodging reporters with a glare Rahkesh headed for the front doors, wondering at Namach's motives. Demonstrating such knowledge of the Chachapoyaro language now…there had to be some tactical advantage. And more annoying, getting rid of Rahkesh – Daray was unlikely to do or say anything Namach wouldn't approve of. Daray _did_ talk back and sometimes ignore orders, but _never_ at a diplomatic reception in front of every other species. No, there the vampires were a unified front with Namach firmly in charge. Rahkesh on the other hand…did Namach not trust his friendship with the Chachapoyaro? They were allies now, and very valuable ones who were just about guaranteed to not turn on them unless truly provoked.

Rahkesh realized he was thinking about this wrong. What did Namach gain? Well he gained time with the Chachapoyaro military leaders, one of whom Rahkesh knew well, when Rahkesh would not be there. Why that? Because Rahkesh's presence might affect their behavior. The Chachapoyaro probably wanted him as their advocate if necessary, which made some sense. Daray and Silas would not….though the cousin's rebel side went far deeper than Rahkesh thought Namach knew of. But still they were vampires and the Chachapoyaro knew about their society.

So that left Rahkesh as possibly having an effect on their new ally's behavior. And perhaps Namach wanted an assessment without that? Or an assessment that the Chachapoyaro were unlikely to notice, but that Rahkesh _would_ notice and not approve of? That seemed more likely; Namach was almost ridiculously devious with his magic use. Well, whatever the reason he wanted Rahkesh out of the way for a few minutes. And he hadn't told Rahkesh he could speak Chachapoyaroan. That was strategic and not terribly surprising. Namach never told anyone any more than he had to unless he was teaching them.

Sharahak was brushing past the departing reporters as Rahkesh reached the door. Sharahak's massive cream and grey wings made the bustling crowd dodge about frantically, while trying to snap pictures. Which proved unfortunate for one poor young man who tripped down the steps outside. Nice.

"They're here?" Sharahak asked immediately.

"Yes, I'm sorry you didn't get earlier warning."

"You told me you were bringing them back. I was reading the mind of one of the Ateres captives. Most of them have died but there're two left. I got a bit preoccupied, didn't notice Tristan's message and it arrived a day ago. He alerted me telepathically a few hours ago when I still hadn't responded." And that, Rahkesh thought, was too late to arrive on time and therefore be there when Namach was greeting their Chachapoyaro allies. Very clever.

"Sharahak, from what you know of the demons battle plans, are they expecting much in the way of counter attacks from us? Are they expecting an even fight or a long drawn out war? Or are they planning for big battles and a few massive fights?" Rahkesh asked.

"The later. They expect to have little opposition."

"And they cannot survive long in this world."

"Correct. Several massive attacks, and the plan is for no demon to have to spend more than a week here. They also don't expect much backlash from our fighters."

"And they've been spending generations training their magical fighters for combat?"

"Yes. What are you asking about Rahkesh?" Sharahak asked.

"I don't really know." Rahkesh admitted. "Just some thoughts on another way to fight this war."

"Anything ready to use?"

"No, not really." Rahkesh sighed.

Arriving back at the gardens minutes later Rahkesh sought out the group by sensing Nic, and led Sharahak over. The big demon quickly outpaced him, striding up behind Nic and wrapping him in a hug from behind. Nic spun so fast he blurred and Sharahak stepped back, laughing, as Nic immediately hugged him back. Everyone in the room turned as the demon's laughter cut across the room in a wave of noise, mixed with Nicodemus's quieter chuckle.

"Sharahak! My favorite reptilian vampire!" Nic exclaimed, grinning ear to ear, dropping his General persona for a moment. Behind him the vampires all wrinkled their noses in annoyance, except for Daray, who huffed and crossed his arms.

"Nicodemus, it's been a thousand years too long!" Sharahak responded in Chachapoyaroan, a traditional greeting. "Anyone else I know wind up entombed with you?"

"Maybe one or two, but unlikely anyone you'd know well." Nic said. "Xeri sent her well wishes, she missed her demon uncle." Nic added, grinning. Sharahak snorted sparks out his nose and Nic ducked, laughing again.

Rahkesh, standing back a bit, noted that the Chachapoyaro present had moved their little groups into a triangular pattern, with no group having less than three in it. They were also keeping an eye on each other across the room, looking for anything suspicious or dangerous about all of these "outsiders". Realizing that the Chachapoyaro were quite capable of looking after themselves Rahkesh left while Nic and Sharahak were talking demon fighting formations and went to find the refreshment table. Now that they were talking combat all of the other Chachapoyaro would be doing the same, and soon everyone would be moving into the meeting rooms. He suspected that he, Daray, and Silas would probably not be welcomed; there were several alumni, including Marvin Gale, present to look after Akren's interests and this gathering didn't look or feel any different than any of the other MLFC meetings. Sure enough, a few minutes later everyone began going inside to the largest conference hall, and the Ateres cousins appeared out of the shadows beside him.

"Headmistress wants us back soon." Silas said, "combat practice and Professors Xanthius and Vaeryes are taking the bloodmagic students to work through the next step in finishing those Life Crystals. Try to make more than one this time Daray." Daray rolled his eyes at his cousin and ignored him.

"Vaeryes? Now that will be a miserable lesson." Rahkesh muttered, rubbing the hurting fingers of his right hand together. "I think this might be a good time to go work on find a way to fix the magical damage in my hand."

"You don't want to learn how to finish the Life Crystals?" Daray asked incredulously. "I know it's Vaeryes and all, and he likes you even less than me, but if Xanthius is there it should be fine."

"True, maybe I'll leave halfway through, Xanthius won't mind and Vaeryes isn't going to get in his way." Rahkesh agreed. "I suppose they also think learning not to sleep is a good thing?" He was tired. "Are you sure the Chachapoyaro won't mind?"

"I think the Chachapoyaro can handle themselves fine." Daray added.

"I was looking forward to them trying to get the diplomats to start war preparations." Rahkesh said.

"That won't be a problem, there's hardly any of them here. We've got less than three weeks, the diplomats got left at home for this meeting." Daray said, grinning.

XX

"While you were away the rest of your family located three portals to the demon world, one of which they think goes only from that world to this." Alexia said, walking into Rahkesh's rooms a few hours after he got out of bloodmagic class. Daray, also out early because another student had blown up the classroom, was draped over Rahkesh's couch.

"And good news?"

"More worse news. These new portals are designed for adult demons and one _only_ goes from that world to this one." Ally replied, flopping onto the chair at Rahkesh's desk. "But I did find out what Haedil's animagus is."

"How angry is he?"

"He doesn't know." Ally said smugly.

"Good for you. What is being done about these new portals?"

"I wish I knew. Right now Akren has officially taken over guarding them. We have six students and six alumni standing at each, on rotations 24/7. As for what else, the Bloodmages and the Necromancers are up to something." Ally said. Daray and Rahkesh traded looks, they hadn't had time to talk to anyone apart from during the MLFC, and so didn't know what was going on.

"Thank you for giving them the update Alexia." The three turned to find their Headmistress, Nvara Aelfly, standing at the doorway. All three moved to get up but Aelfly waved them back down. "The Guilds do have a plan and you, Rahkesh, will be needed."

"Uh, me?"

"Yes. Now how is that hand?" Rahkesh almost choked as the Akren Headmistress conjured and armchair and sat down. Akren students didn't often see the Headmistress, except for the students in the uppermost final year classes. She tutored Akren students privately, about what no one but they knew, and apart from that just ran the school. Which, at Akren, did not mean just paperwork and sitting at a desk. Rahkesh glanced at Ally and Daray, Daray knew or had guessed just about everything about his injury, Ally probably knew as well.

"Oh relax Rahkesh, I've already guessed it all." Ally said, "and I can sense you did something to the phoenix part."

"I'm not going to ask how you knew it was a phoenix."

"That was the easy guess." Ally said dryly, "your magic with that wand felt like it had phoenix magic in it. Easy." Rahkesh and Daray blinked at her in confusion while Aelfly just waited patiently, looking amused. Rahkesh concentrated and found the wards on his room and activated them, feeling them flare to life and draw their power from him.

"I realized that a phoenix is an animal, and I was already using its magic, sort of. The phoenix feather in my wand had become just magic, no solids, and…well infected I guess…the living cells in part of my hand, interrupting magic flows. So I located that major concentration of phoenix magic and sent it into my blood stream, and spread it out throughout my body. At such a low concentration it's harmless."

"Any side effects?" Aelfly asked.

"No idea. The phoenix whose feather it was, I knew him well, and he once used his tears to heal me, so I'm assuming that had some influence."

"It would have." Aelfly said. "A magical animal that knows you and approves of you? Oh yes, what you did would not have worked otherwise. What about the wood?"

"I haven't figured that out."

"Any ideas?"

"Yes. I was going to just summon it, just a little, and put it into my blood. I can then remove it through my bloodmagic poison removal locations." Rahkesh said. "The one on my right wrist is damaged and I haven't repaired it, but I've got the others and they're intact. I was going to remove it just like I would a poison. The only trick would be to do it slowly, so the movement of that raw foreign magic didn't kill me as it went through me." Rahkesh explained. Nvara was grinning.

"Very good. That is what Xanthius came up with as well. With one exception, a summoning spell won't work for that. You'll have to utilize your other bloodmagic. You could do it by wandless magic but you're not that advanced and this is something you'll have to do yourself. You could also do it with a combination of necromantic and wandless magic, but again you're nowhere near that far along. The only problem is that none of those ways, or yours, will remove all of it. There will be some residue left behind that you'll probably never get out."

"What will that do?" Rahkesh asked, fearful.

"There won't be any serious damage, but those scars will never heal and you will always feel some minor aches and pains in that hand. Not serious and they ought to diminish as you age."

"Why would that happen?"

"Because that wood, converted to magic, got blasted into the scar tissue and into your magic. You can get rid of the excess so it doesn't kill you but the minute bits will remain. Too low level to remove, probably, but a little bit will have set like drying concrete into that hand."

"At that level it won't cause any problems with any magics, just a little pain?"

"That's what we think will happen. Tristan seems to think your body will naturally remove even that on its own, slowly."

"Why?"

"Merlin's work on removing foreign magic utilized the chemical differences between himself and his animagus form. Tristan thinks you can do the same. Your basilisk form. How much do you know about it?"

"Very little, and while I've worked at accessing the parselmagic some of it is fragmented and blurred. I think I could clear it up and recover more information but I'd need months to work on it."

"While you were gone for a few days Tristan did some investigating into basilisks. During your species territorial fighting season in the fall, and then during the spring…mating season I think? Yes? During those two times the basilisk hormones increase dramatically. Now no one has ever studied the chemical make-up of those hormones but the dragon fanatics have done some similar research in dragons, which are related, though distantly. In them extreme hormone levels have a cleansing effect on their systems. If you're similar then the basilisk hormones, at high magical level, become highly energized and change their chemical form. This might have the effect of removing impurities from your system. If Tristan is right, and he means to test you twice a year for the rest of your life if possible to investigate this, then twice a year a tiny bit of the wood remains would be removed. Not all at once, the magical hormones aren't that strong, but they'll break it up a bit each time and at the least you'll be able to remove those bits."

"A rather far-fetched theory."

"That's what everyone said when he came up with the idea of deliberately manifesting animagus traits, like wings, in human form. That's also what everyone said when he claimed a living human could send their mind into death and come back with complete memories of what death was like, without any permanent damage." Aelfly said, smiling. "Dear Tristan is fundamentally a scientist I think; as soon as he can find the time he'll be catching basilisks to harvest their blood at the right times of year to test what it can do. So, when are you going to remove that wood?"

"As soon as I figure out what bloodmagics can help…maybe my healing stuff?"

"You're not fixing. Try something magically affected your muscles and bones at the cellular level, but works magically. That magic ought to already be in the right place to get you there. Once you have that fully activated a deep trance and some help from the mind magic and wandless magic professors ought to do it. Go talk to them soon. The Necromancers Guild has a plan for killing vast numbers of demons, in their own realm, and they need a thunderbird and they need one soon and a normal one won't do." Aelfly said, standing and leaving with a click of her boots.

"Have fun figuring that out." Ally said. "I'm off, see you later."

"Where are you going?"

"Daray pet, I, have plans that _I_ am part of, to greet the demons properly. You do not need to know." Ally said gently, sweeping out of the room with a swish of her hair.

"Did you know she could sense magic that well?" Daray asked as soon as the door closed.

"No. Did you?"

"No. Do you want help?" Daray asked. Rahkesh considered it for a moment. It wasn't yet noon. He could probably be ready for his first ritual by evening if he had someone to bounce ideas off of. Which meant he'd be up all day and night again, and they had more training the next day. The vampires would manage, they could go for longer without rest than he could, but adding a bloodmagic ritual into things would probably knock him out before noon the next day. And if Vaeryes was upset, well, Rahkesh would send Sygra to chase him.

"If you have nothing better to do."

"I don't. The two bloodmagic chambers I could use are scheduled by everyone else for the next day and a half so I can't do my next piece."

"What are you doing?"

"A shielding piece, the first part of the shielding against magic set."

"That's the one that has thirty-six pieces?"

"Yes. Namach developed it two thousand years ago and everybody but centaurs has very similar runes, thirty-six rituals of them. I wonder why he never went further than thirty-six?"

"Didn't need to, or couldn't – too much of your bloodmagic reacting outwards and you get an imbalance, or you open up weak spots since it's drawing magic into a shield you've got less internally." Rahkesh pointed out. "You'll need a special knife."

"There's one in the Akren armory that works fine for me for at least the first ritual."

"Really?" Rahkesh was surprised, Daray was rather unique.

"Demon claw in the handle, vampire blood around it, plus magical vampire bat blood and a phoenix claw in the blade with turtle shell pieces on the blade, which is white unicorn bone."

"Sounds like one of Namach's."

"You can always tell by the number of ingredients can't you? It works great for vampires doing shielding stuff. Demon claw for death magic in the poison in their claws, phoenix for immortal protection. I can't quite figure out how the hell it works, but it works. Vampire blood is his."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but it can't be extracted or the demon claw and phoenix magic and all the rest cancel out and it blows up and kills you, or some such. Plus it's his blood and was removed in a special method, can't be used against him unless you're a vampire that can already overpower him."

"Good luck finding one of those."

"Maybe Grandmother could on a good day." Daray mused, then shrugged. Rahkesh didn't know enough about what the Ateres matriarch was actually capable of doing to evaluate that.

"Daray your family owns several pieces of land that are copies of the muggle world, that are removed from it?"

"Yes, several….enough that I don't know the exact number and enough that I think grandmother has forgotten the location of one."

"Those places, they can only be accessed through this world, the demons couldn't go directly into them?"

"Exactly. The links are such that the demons, even if there was a portal on such lands, it wouldn't work. Why?"

"I was wondering about using such places as retreats, since the shelters will only hold a few."

"Several countries are building their shelters on such lands. But those types of places, the borders are linked to the muggle world and because the enchantments are layered – there's no other way to do it – we can expect the demons will eventually be able to peel them apart."

"And when that happens?"

"The magics break and everything that was on that magically copied and removed land either gets erased or winds up dropped into the muggle world, replacing whatever is there. What happens depend on which enchantments were used, there're two types."

"The demons can't survive long in this world, so they won't have long to work on breaking the enchantments."

"They can work in rotating teams." Daray pointed out.

"Not if they're under constant attack."

"Which doesn't work too well if we can't figure out where they are; the borders of those lands can be awfully big. Remember ALL of Australia was copied like that. That's a lot of border and demons can attack many places, they only need to get in between enchantment layers in one spot."

"And there are so many of those lands that they can't all be defended." Rahkesh agreed, nodding. And idea was beginning to form, but it was like trying to see through fog.

XX

"Remember, the candles first." Namach said as Rahkesh entered the bloodmagic chamber that evening. Rahkesh nodded and closed the doors. Namach moved around to the windows, where Daray, Silas, Xanthius, Vaeryes, and six older students who were in their last year of studies were watching. No one had mentioned to Rahkesh how much of an audience he'd have. Probably just as well, he'd get self-conscious. The six older students were still all about two years from completing the basic requirements to be ready to test for a place among the third rank of bloodmages. Their professors were hoping they'd learn a few things; Rahkesh's bloodmagic was different enough and this particular exercise rare enough that it could be a useful teaching tool. It was towards the end of the time when most students ate dinner, and so very few strays were about in the bloodmagic corridors.

The idea was that Rahkesh would use his bloodmagics designed at improving his body to reach the level the wood wand fragments existed on. These bloodmagics were always active because of their nature, they were improvements to the human body and because they were so internalized they could function even in areas where all other magic was impossible. They were the strongest type of bloodmagics, almost impossible to damage badly enough to cause them to fail. Once Rahkesh fully completed the number of rituals for each type of improvement they would be fully permanent. Rahkesh had already completed a beginner level three-piece set of stamina runes and a beginner level three-piece set of night vision enhancing rituals. Both would be needed for this.

The windows into the bloodmagic room were coated in magic, on the outside, that allowed the viewers to watch but did not admit any light into the room. Inside the room Rahkesh, naked and covered in glowing runes, slowly woke up all of his bloodmagics, checked each piece individually to make sure nothing was off or acting oddly. The only light came from seven candles.

The number was significant; soul magic worked with rituals using odd numbers, arrays of triangles, five-pointed stars, or three or five strong runes locations were common. Necromancy and regular bloodmagic used even numbers. There was some overlap as soul magic sometimes drew on the other two and the interconnectedness of bloodmagic work made thing diverge from the rules. Seven was a number of magical importance; there were seven basic magical states of mind that the mind had to progress through during mind magic, there were seven levels a necromancer had to pass through to reach death, seven was the optimum number of bits of soul a necromancer would leave on the other side of the life/death barrier, magics in the eyes worked on a three-dimensional seven-pointed star basis (at the very advanced level), magics working on improving brain functions (advanced ones) did the same. Finally you could magically separate any piece of human bone into seven layers, the same for the magics that worked in tissues layers in the skin, and to do seriously advanced bloodmagic work magic had to formed into a three-dimensional repeating structure with seven segments that would repeated, linked, throughout every blood vessel in the body. Rahkesh was doing work that was physical and he needed to manipulate magic and flesh and so he needed seven separate focuses.

The bloodmagic on the floor was fairly simplistic. Nothing on the walls or ceiling, just the floor. There were several minor patterns traced lightly in blood on the floor to hold and channel the magic that he needed to remove from his hand so he could actually identify the wood fragments, but the real major pattern was remarkably simplistic; Rahkesh was at the center of seven long lines of blood that all crossed where he knelt, leaving fourteen points at the edges of the perfectly circular room. The candles were actually floating, flaming, balls of liquid, and Rahkesh slowly lowered them until each hit one of the lines on the floor. Then the liquid spread along the line of blood, burning. Each liquid was unique. Rahkesh had used the wood from the same tree species as his wand, and removed the sap. This he had mixed with his own blood. Each line now carried the same amount of Rahkesh's blood, and a slightly different concentration of tree sap. Rahkesh would use these different concentrations to guide him in slowly removing the magic wood fragments. He would do this in seven different bloodmagic exercises, each with seven different concentrations of sap in the flaming lines on the floor.

It was a very good thing indeed that Rahkesh's blood was already flammable, otherwise this would never have worked. As it was the bloodmagic was fairly simple and straightforward, but it only worked because of what Rahkesh had already done, because his blood was already flammable, and because he was good at removing poisons from his system by bloodmagic. Beside him on the floor was a large orb. Supplied by professor Darkwind it was made of chips of basilisk fang and thunderbird feather, melted together. He had used feathers and fang chips form Rahkesh's animal forms since nothing else would work. The melting had been done in Darkwind's magical forges and he had coated the whole thing (which was basically a giant hollow ball) with a magical alloy that had chemistry the same as the mineral concentrations currently in Rahkesh's blood. A tiny opening in the top of the ball allowed Rahkesh to pour in the magic he removed from himself

It took, not surprisingly, fourteen hours for Rahkesh to finish. By that time the ball was one seventh full and glowing the color of dried blood. As the last of the flames on the floor died Rahkesh blinked and stretched a little. He had been sitting cross-legged and now that he was waking his knees _hurt_. More painful were the spikes of agony in his right hand and arm every time his fingers touched anything or twitched at all. Bright sparks of pain flashed up his hand and arm to his shoulder, making his back and neck cramp every time he breathed too deep. His right arm felt nearly useless and his fingers throbbed agonizingly, not responding when he tried to curl them. The lightning-like scars felt hot as fresh coals and full of tiny shocks, as though there was actual lightning in them. He knew this was really his own magic that had been trapped and twisted smoothing itself out. He stretched slowly, careful not to disturb any of the blood on the floor. A long soak in a hot bath sounded amazingly good. It took nearly twenty minutes before he could stand and move without stumbling.

Outside the room only Namach remained, the others having left many hours earlier. Rahkesh guessed that Namach had as well, or this was golem. Either way he'd probably been observing with part of his mind telepathically rather than physically being present for fourteen hours. Rahkesh paused in the changing room outside the main chamber, swaying a little, and then looking around for his robe. He was so exhausted his eyeballs ached and he wanted nothing more than to sleep. His head ached and he felt almost too weary to move.

"What should I do with this?" Rahkesh asked, holding up the ball containing what he had removed.

"Save it. I have no idea what it could be used for, but never throw things away that are magical." Namach said. "How do you feel?"

"My joints hurt, the locations I was removing the stuff through hurt. My right hand feels like its being burned or electrocute, and not in a good way." Rahkesh said, ignoring the amused expression when he mentioned being electrocuted possibly being a good thing. "It's almost as bad as a locally concentrated cruciatus." He added, trying to avoid touching anything with his right hand. There was nothing to do about the pain but accept it. Through his training at Akren Rahkesh had learned to do this, to relax and simply tolerate pain, but this was nearly too much. "I'm going to go soak in a bath of healing potions." Rahkesh said, wrapping his old dark red robes, the ones he wore when doing bloodmagic, tighter around him. He needed rest. He was so tired he could probably fall asleep ignoring the pain in his hand. He'd have to ask Sygra to make sure he didn't fall asleep in the bathtub.

"Tell Sygra to watch your vitals while you sleep, just in case." Namach said, sniffing the air and probably smelling Rahkesh's tiredness.

"I think she already always does that. She says I can't keep myself healthy so she has to." Rahkesh said sheepishly. Namach laughed. "Can I do the next part tomorrow?"

"No, thirty hours minimum."

"With six more of those to do? I'll only barely be done before the demons arrive."

"Then you'd better use those thirty hours to study and practice hadn't you?"

"I will. If you don't mind…is this you or a golem?" Rahkesh asked. Trying to focus enough to tell.

"Just me." Namach said, amused. Rahkesh was too tired to note that he hadn't actually answered the question. "I watched you work long distance while working on demon magic detection systems in Iran and Argentina."

"At the same time?"

"Of course." Namach said, smiling smugly.

"I don't suppose I could manage to learn that in a human lifetime?" Rahkesh asked.

"Possibly." Namach said, fangs flashing. Rahkesh turned and pressed his palm to the controls on the doors of the bloodmagic chamber, wiping it clean of the leftover contents. Sygra uncoiled from the coat rack and draped herself over his shoulders. As he straightened, flexing his aching knees, Rahkesh paused, staring at the ball in his hands, slowly turning it around, the idea he'd been trying to visualize all day finally taking form.

"Professor…I think I may have a solution to our demon problem."

XX

The emergency meeting of the MLFC began at nine a.m. (By Rahkesh's watch, which was on Akren time). And before noon they had an evaluation of the feasibility of Rahkesh's idea; it would either be the greatest magical achievement of all time or it would fail spectacularly and take everyone involved with it.

Having explained his idea Rahkesh had promptly been more or less forgotten as magical experts were brought in from every species, maps appeared over every available surface, massive globes sprang up to work on, books were dragged off of old bookshelves from every library on the planet and the diplomats and politicians were kicked out so the sorcerers could get to work. Rahkesh didn't mind, he didn't know anything about the magics he was proposing using.

"We can't possibly connect the pieces, the magics are too different."

"No one's ever copied whole _oceans_ before!" A magical marine life specialist from Chile roared, pounding on a table.

"We don't even know half the magical life in the seas, never mind the nonmagic stuff!"

"We'd disrupt every nutrient cycle in the oceans and collapse the whole ecosystem!"

Rahkesh pushed his way through the crowd to the table where the marine specialists were conferring. "Rather than complain about what you don't know tell me why would the methods that work on land _not_ work on the seas?" He asked sharply over their heads. There was a long pause around the table.

"He's got a point." An older female werewolf from Canada finally said in the silence.

"Copy every water molecule in the oceans? Absurd!"

"Why not?" Rahkesh persisted. "If the Australians copied their entire continent with just their own populace working on it, why couldn't all magical life provide the magic to jointly copy the world's oceans?"

"But we don't know what's there!"

"Neither did the Australians when they copied Australia!" the Canadian werewolf snapped.

Rahkesh idea was very simple; if they couldn't save the parts of the world that had been magically copied and removed because those had borders, then they just had to get rid of those borders by copying the whole world. It wouldn't have to be tied to the nonmagic world anywhere. If they exactly replicated the entire world and all life in it (except the muggles), magically, they'd be safe from the demons. They'd be behind a magical barrier with no edges to it, and the demons wouldn't survive long in the muggle world or their new one even if they managed to get in. Fighting in _two_ worlds the demons couldn't last long in gave them more of an advantage than just one, and that was only if the demons managed to get in. And no one had yet come up with an idea of how that would be possible without any edges to the magic.

It was simplistic, and Rahkesh knew nothing about the magics necessary to accomplish it. Nor did he have any idea of the time span necessary. It was just a thought that had been nagging him all day. A long-shot possibility that seemed like a good idea in theory, in the theory of someone who knew not a thing about the process. He'd been a bit surprised when Namach had heard him out, and then decided to call the entire MLFC. Rahkesh had insisted on going along because he wanted to know if he was being absurd or if this had some merit. It had been a surprise when everyone had apparently decided it was possible. If this was possible why hadn't anyone done it before?

Rahkesh hadn't heard any thoughts on how long it would take, but the creation of world specifically for magical life and all nonmagical life that wasn't human (obviously muggles wouldn't be allowed in, or be able to get there. And the magical life forms didn't exist on their own, they would need nonmagic plant and animal life as well) was apparently a perfect solution for a lot of problems.

Aside from the demon problem this would also solve the perpetual not-acknowledged-but-very-real war going on between the faeries and the muggles. Every time muggles destroyed their forests the faeries retaliated with biological warfare and killed a few million muggles. The muggles hadn't noticed it much since the faeries used disease to do their dirty work (malaria being a favorite), but the faeries would be safe and the muggles could go ahead with whatever they wanted to do without conflict. This would have been a major issue when the magical world and the nonmagic one collided. And so the faeries were fully on board.

The centaurs, sick of hiding from muggles, had instantly thrown in a yes vote, with Vaire stomping into the middle of the hall and supporting it before any other delegate could. Rahkesh was grateful, as soon as the centaurs jumped on the idea the faeries had followed instantly. This meant that Rahkesh hadn't had to persuade anyone.

It also meant that they could hide this war from the muggles. Additionally it would separate muggles and intelligent magical life and this was what had gained him Namach's instant support. The vampires had wanted the magical and muggles worlds mixed anyway, this way the magical world could still be safe and separate. The muggles wouldn't feel as threatened by them and they could still go ahead with plans to reintroduce the muggles to magic eventually. Because magical stuff was in a magical world the muggles wouldn't have to deal with any of it – no dragons flying around or any such thing. This would reassure the muggles and reaching a working relationship with the muggles would be much easier.

Building a new world would take a while though, longer than they had, and so Namach would still get his war and end the stalemate between the demons and Earth, but this was a factor that very few knew about. And even if it wasn't over by the time the new world was ready those that survived and fled would have lost enough that they would continue the fight, and the new lands could serve as a safe haven to launch attacks from. The ancient vampire thought the tactical possibilities were appealing, and with his support went every other vampire. Cyala Ateres had agreed simply because it would bother the elves and show off Earth's power, always a good reason for doing anything as far as the Lady Assassin was concerned.

And if they did decide to let the muggles know about the demons they'd gain an ally, since magical children were born to muggle families. If they didn't tell them they still had a safe place to evacuate those new magical people too, preventing the demons from getting them first would be the only obstacle. And it eliminated the problem of the shelters not having enough space. Mrs. Stocklir had pounced on the idea like a hungry lioness and started calling experts in the magics needed and getting them to the Conclave before the first meeting ended. After praising Rahkesh to the skies (before he could realize the publicity and run) she'd taken over the meeting and started getting the news published and calling in anyone who might be able to help.

Looking around at the scene of chaos Rahkesh picked out the small band of Chachapoyaro, who were off at their own table looking through books on how other species went about magically copying a piece of land and removing it from the world.

"I don't suppose your lands will be at all compatible?" He asked, conjuring an extra seat beside Nic.

"Not at all." Sonivale said cheerfully. "Which is fine with us."

"Why?" Rahkesh asked, thinking that Sonivale was definitily descended from Nicodemus.

"Well according to your few politicians, before they were sent running, personal property would be an issue. People own lands that have been magically copied, and they're too different to connect to each other. Therefore the world would have to copied anew, and those lands would be lost, is this correct?"

"Yes."

"I don't see the problem." Nic said, "if the world is copied again, and these lands are magical, why not just move them into the new world? Attach them to a new location there. This is what we will do. Our lands only have two entrances, and we can connect each to a different location in this new magical world. With small stable connection points this ought not to be too difficult. We get our separate lands and you also get those same lands in the larger world for your use. Why can't everyone do the same with individual property?"

"A very good point." Rahkesh said, sending out a magical jolt to Namach. With the chaos all around they weren't really getting anywhere, and arguing over whether or not to try to connect all the scattered bits of copied land seemed to be a major issue. The ancient vampire arrived a few minutes later, along with Stocklir, and Nic explained the Chachapoyaro's thoughts again. Stocklir listened intently, then promptly turned around, drawing her wand.

"Cover your ears." Namach warned seconds before Stocklir's firecrackers shocked everyone into silence.

Rahkesh grimaced as sparks brushed close to his aching hand and the pain made his vision swim. As Stocklir took control of the meeting and began sending people to begin research on specific tasks he got up and left the room through the back door.

_You need rest._ Sygra hissed at Rahkesh.

_No time._

_Are all humans such fools? It's a wonder your species has lasted. Go get some rest Rahkesh. _

_Sygra…_ Rahkesh stopped and turned as Nicodemus appeared at his shoulder.

"Are you ill?" Nic asked, steadying Rahkesh with a ahdn on his shoulder.

"No." Rahkesh said, trying to ignore the searing pain in his left hand and arm. Ripples of painful magic kept going through his mind and he could almost feel every vein in his body aching.

"You look like it. Actually you look rather like you did after they brought you back in from freeing Enireth and getting attacked by all those demons. At which point, if I have not forgotten, you were out cold for weeks."

"I'm just tired." Rahkesh said, resting against a stone pillar. His vision was swimming and he was starting to feel sick.

"Uh huh." Nic said dubiously. "Some how I don't believe that."

"I did a ritual last night. It was a long one." Rahkesh said, beginning to sway a little "I-" Rahkesh crumpled to the ground.

Back in the meeting halls the bloodmages present all looked up as bloodmagic power surged outside. Namach shoved them all back to their seats magically and woke up one of the golems he'd had sleeping. Switching places with it too fast to see the vampire teleported directly to his unconscious student.

Nicodemus's trained reflexes caught Rahkesh just before he hit the ground. As Rahkesh fully slipped into unconsciousness Sygra pulled her fangs out of his neck and uncoiled from him. Rahkesh's bloodmagic had started reacting and while he'd been too tired to notice the many small magical surges that were building up or the changes in the magic induced pain he was feeling, she had sensed them. Rahkesh had been heading for psychic shock and so Sygra had knocked him out. Sometimes humans could not be argued with, but that was okay, there were other ways of dealing with them when they got stubborn. Rahkesh could be angry later, and then he'd admit that, as usual, his familiar knew best.

An instant later magic wrapped around them. Nicodemus sensed it as transportation magic and caught it. Deliberately he moved through it with Rahkesh and Sygra. The magic was unfamiliar and tightly wound, difficult to get a fix on. Nicodemus quickly sorted out what bits were the ones causing the movement. While he didn't know the destination he followed the magics and went to their source alongside Rahkesh and Sygra.

Nicodemus dropped Rahkesh and drew a knife, scanning the room he had landed in. Golden threadmagic sparkled across his clothes and the bones, gems, and feathers all activated. Instantly his clothing had morphed into elegant glistening gold and black metal and leather armor covered with a spray of precious metals and fire colored gems with magical purposes in combat. His weapons, hidden inside the gems he carried on his "formal" clothes, activated and returned their proper places in full useable size and form.

Nicodemus ignored all of this, turning full circle while standing with one foot on each side of Rahkesh, who was unlikely to move and trip him. Also no violent magic could react around his feet without harming Rahkesh, thereby making his unconscious friend possibly the safest location in the room. However the room he had landed in did not look particularly threatening. It was an oval room of white marble. There were five massive windows, gold silk drapes, two couches, four chairs, a large bed, and gold and emeralds everywhere…and dark magic all around. A sharp growl spun him around, knife coming up.

Namach batted the knife aside and stepped around the angry warrior, he was furious that the young General had somehow managed to jump through his teleportation magic on his own, but had not made any effort to block him or harm him magically. Though it would have been easy to do so with the wards on the building. He was more focused on his student at the moment. Sygra got out of the way as he knelt and checked Rahkesh's pulse. With an irritated sound the vampire waved and sent Rahkesh's body flying across the room and onto the massive bed. Still ignoring Nicodemus the vampire raised an eyebrow at Sygra, who hissed, showing off her fangs. Namach laughed, startling Nicodemus badly enough to make him jump.

"Well it's a good thing he has you isn't it?" Namach asked the snake. Picking her up he walked over and dropped her onto Rahkesh's chest.

"Where the hell are we?" Nicodemus snapped finally, using an English curse he'd heard often from Daray.

"One of my estates." Namach said calmly, refusing to get ruffled over the youngster. He moved a chair across the room with a wave of his hand. "Will your comrades miss you for a few minutes?"

"No. I told them I might be a while." Nicodemus said warily, not sitting down. Rahkesh, Daray, and Silas trusted this creature, he did not. "What happened to him?"

"Mostly just exhaustion," the vampire answered. His fingers skimmed Rahkesh's face and Rahkesh's bloodmagic runes appeared in a dull gray. Silvery magic rose to cover Rahkesh's body, the runes showing through. The silver magic wove itself into lines and patterns and runes all over Rahkesh, finally settling into layers that resembled a skeleton and all the major tissue and bone layers. The vampire manipulated the rune parts for a moment, drawing silver strands of magic around and watching what they did. "Thirty hours without any rest during which he did a fourteen hour bloodmagic ritual, added to the damage in his magic at the moment was a bit too much. Silly boy ought to have gone and gotten some rest."

"So why didn't you tell him to?" Nic snapped. The angry burning look he got in response didn't faze him at all, though he did avoid the ancient vampire's eyes. Rahkesh had explained the mind magics of the outside world to him and they were not so different from what he himself was trained in, but no sense in possibly revealing _that_.

"At Akren, we let our students learn on their own." Namach growled darkly. "That includes being smart enough to manage their own health. This could easily have been avoided by six hours sleep and a short soak in a bath of healing potions. He ought to have done that _before_ presenting this crazy idea of his. There was no need to rush that much; six hours would not have made a difference. He could also have written down or just explained the idea and then gone to get some rest, instead he insisted on being at the meeting. It is unfortunate that clear thinking and rationality cannot be taught, they have to be learned."

"So you just let him collapse?" Nicodemus was incredulous. Sure, his friends had explained their training system to him, but experiencing it was another matter.

"Yes." The vampire replied, not seeing anything at all wrong with that. "If this was lethal then he would just die, but it isn't, and therefore I'll help him." Actually given that Rahkesh dying in bloodmagic would be extremely destructive, and he needed the young human alive at the moment, he would have interfered there too, if he could, but this stranger didn't need to know that.

Before Nicodemus could start getting really angry the doors opened and two young women came in. One carried a tray with two cups of steaming potions on it. The other had a bag, which she took through a doorway of golden wood and diamonds, and into the adjoining room. The first left her tray on the bedside table and departed with a short bow and a swish of pale blue skirts.

"What now?"

"Relax child." Namach sighed, irritated. "He will be fine with some rest. Sygra's put him to sleep for a few hours. Sasha will have a bath with the correct potions ready when he wakes."

Sygra coiled up on Rahkesh's chest and hissed softly at Nicodemus. He didn't understand her, but if the snake thought this was okay he was willing to trust her.

"I'm staying." He said sharply as the vampire stood up and the magics on Rahkesh faded. The tall vampire turned and fixed him with a pair of glowing silver eyes. Nicodemus jerked his gaze away and the room went dark as night, all the light vanishing, and the windows black. A deep growl came from the darkness.

"Not for any longer than it takes you to explain to me why an Akren student has a magical connection with one of your kind."

-

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Ever wonder what the world would be like if you could create it in any way you wanted? Try imagining this cast of characters building _their_ own world. Then try imagining the demons attempting to attack them.

Please Review


	28. Chapter 28

Many, many thanks to everyone who reviewed. This chapter was a pain to write. Not because I didn't have ideas but because I kept beginning to write the demon invasion, and then realizing that I still had more stuff that needed to get tied up first.

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Chapter 28

Rahkesh slipped into the bath, hissing in pain as the heated water splashed across the scars on his right hand and forearm. Knowing it would help, even if it hurt, he submerged the hand as well, breathing out slowly. The pain faded slowly and the potions in the water went to work on his exhausted body. The magic in the potions wrapped soothingly around him and smoothed out the mixed and uneven magic flows.

The bath was big enough for eight or nine, white marble with sapphires woven into waves and swirls all around the edges. Tristan Namach's flaunting of his wealth was a little ridiculous sometimes, but it wasn't like anyone was going to argue with him about it. There was seating around the edge of the bath and jets pulsing waves of water all around. Some of the potions added to the water were making it froth and shimmer a little as the water roiled. Steam rising from the bath coated the windows and the ceiling was almost invisible through the vapor. Rahkesh felt like he was relaxing in a warm pleasant scented cloud.

Rahkesh opened his eyes as soft footsteps came around beside the bath. A tall lovely dark young woman was standing beside him, in a highly flattering tight skimpy outfit, holding out a small phial of neon green potion.

"What's this?" Rahkesh asked, taking it.

"It'll stop excess magic building up in the holes you've got in your hand right now." She said.

"Thank you. I was not aware Namach hired humans to work on his estates." Rahkesh observed. He guessed based on her accent that he was in Australia, probably.

"Only this one I think. It's a bloodmagic research center. Bloodmages who have rituals or magics go wrong get brought here, they die anyway. The point is to study what actually goes wrong and try to find ways to save them or fix the damage."

"You are not a bloodmage." Rahkesh stated. He could sense that.

"No." She grinned, "I'm not foolish enough. I'm still in University, studying magical plants. The human help takes care of over a hundred square kilometers of magic absorbing plants. The plants that I work with absorb either death magic or healing magic, or raw undirected magic. That way when the dying bloodmages do go the magical explosion gets absorbed and doesn't mess up climate patterns or some such. I don't understand that part of it. I just care for the plants and buildings during my breaks from school. It pays better than anything else I could find." She smiled again and exited quickly. Rahkesh felt Namach's dark presence suddenly appear across the room.

The shadows writhed and flowed out form the walls before dropping back, leaving the ancient vampire standing next to one of the massive arched windows. Namach was wearing dark red and black bloodmetal and leather armor with an array of knives and swords. Rahkesh had never seen him wearing lots of weapons, not openly anyway. Other vampires might use the psychological impact of looking like a walking armory to intimidate, Namach didn't need to.

"A bit of good luck for us." Namach said in way of greeting, "Cyala's brood located six demons trying to open a portal to their world. They must not have noticed the elven magics preventing that."

"What happened?"

"The last of Cyala's prisoners have died so she grabbed two of these so her angels could practice fighting them. I took two for the Akren alumni and students to train against, and the fae, werewolves, centaur, and humans are squabbling over the last two."

"We could always ask Sharahak to help them train." Rahkesh pointed out. That they had a demon allied with them had been released to the public, but Sharahak's cloaking enchantments made his coloring appear dark red and brown rather than its true cream and gray. Sharahak didn't particularly want that anymore either; he'd vowed to never return to the demon realm even if it meant dying, but Namach had insisted, something about possibly pulling a clever trick on the demons.

"He's already volunteered. And while I tried to point out to Cyala that she knows perfectly well what an alpha demon can do, since she has one already named Daray, she still won't part with the two she captured."

"Well, if the Ateres are having fun torturing their captives they aren't causing any other trouble." Rahkesh pointed out. Cyala's half-sister Kylara was apparently bullying those vampires who had been slow to release their human slaves in their new alliance with the humans. Rahkesh was sure it was some sort of ploy to get the humans to trust Cyala. By Namach's almost-eye-roll he probably agreed.

"How do you feel?" Namach asked, sitting in a wooden chair by the windows. He sounded genuinely concerned.

"Much better. How long was I out for?"

"Ten hours." Namach said. Rahkesh saw movement and a moment later Sygra, who had been missing when he woke, uncoiled from around Namach's neck and crossed the room. Slipping into the bath she swam easily across it and up onto Rahkesh's elbow, which was resting on the edge of the tub.

_We will have a chat. Just the two of us. When he leaves. _

_What have you been up to?_

_You were resting peacefully and in no danger. I decided to explore. I like this place. _

_You do?_

_Yes. There is a pair of massive golden serpents at the front doors. The vampire found me trying to talk to them. But apparently they are not magically animated. He and his servants found this most amusing. _

_His servants? _

_Not the human ones. The shadow ones. He'd be ever so upset I'm sure, but I know what they are. _

_You have been busy, I'm impressed. _Rahkesh was not so foolish as to talk about those shadow servants with Namach sitting across the room, not when they were supposed to be highly secret.

_You had better be impressed. I am not particularly impressed with you at the moment. I now understand why humans must stay with their parents for such a long time; you are incapable of keeping yourselves healthy and safe even when you leave the nest. _

"Only ten hours? Feels like twenty." Rahkesh said, not replying to Sygra. He felt surprisingly well rested. Probably magics in the room or on the bed. He could smell scented candles, probably magical in some way.

"You're a little bit of fool sometimes. Going that long without rest and doing a ritual to remove those wood fragments? What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't."

"Clearly. And hopefully you have learned not to do that." Namach drawled in his best as-a-teacher-I-put-up-with-so-much-shit voice. "Have you checked your bloodmagic yet?"

"A little. My hand feels okay. Painful but okay. I guess my magics are still working the kinks out and getting untwisted. But only 1/7th of the wand fragments were removed so I think the pain is there to stay for the moment."

"How bad?"

"Not debilitating by any means. And feeling better by the minute. What is in this bath?" Rahkesh asked, amazed at how fast it was working. Namach chuckled.

"A few potions of my own creation for use after particularly unpleasant bloodmagic work. It really can be an awfully painful form of magic, cutting oneself up, even though most rituals only barely make you bleed it's still unpleasant. And the rituals with the most benefit require the most pain, even if the benefits make it entirely worthwhile. However once you've done your second magic focusing ritual it won't hurt so much anymore."

"I've read about that. Can't happen too soon." Rahkesh sighed. At that point the control of magic in the blood during a ritual reached a level that allowed a skilled sorcerer to fixate enough on the directing of the magic that he no longer felt pain from the knives. At the same time the entire body became part of the ritual so well that the cuts no longer hurt; your body accepted the new magical ability almost eagerly. It didn't work for all rituals, but for a lot of them it would. Rituals that involved things like working under the fingernails would still hurt, but there were rituals that allowed the user to block all sensation of pain. Which was very dangerous because then you didn't know if you were hurt.

And after the third magic focusing ritual many reported actually enjoying doing bloodmagic. They didn't lose blood anymore during rituals and though they still did lose blood during warding and all other sorts of bloodmagic some said it actually felt good. Rahkesh could understand that, to submerge oneself entirely in the magic and weave it into directed powerful flows.

Of course, this was deceptive. The less painful the magic was the more likely you were to overdo it. Or bloodmages lost concentration and enjoyed it too much. All the same Rahkesh was looking forward to rituals not hurting. He'd also be able to do more warding then and better offensive bloodmagic fighting. Bloodmagic was nearly limitless if you got far enough.

"I also put a few healing potions in there, and one that slowly removes excess magic from scar tissue." Namach added.

"Thanks, its working." Rahkesh assured him. "What exactly is this place?"

"One of my research institutes. There are four bloodmages here studying why rituals go bad. When you become an actual bloodmage you'll learn more. Basically whenever someone is using bloodmagic and it doesn't work the research team tries to get to them before they die, bring them here, and save them. The reason is that if we can discover how to fix such damage we'll gain a better understanding of how magic works."

"What about Akren students who mess stuff up?" Rahkesh asked. They ALL died, messily, nastily. Everyone knew that.

"There's a reason why the bell system in the bloodmagic chambers was put up. If I can get there in time I remove them too, to see what can be done. We've never saved anyone who messed up doing a ritual. Actually we've never saved anyone with seriously messed up bloodmagic at all. Usually you're beyond help in half a minute, but for those we get faster than that we've managed to keep them alive for a day or so. The result has been knowledge that has allowed me to engineer bloodmagic wards that last longer, even past their creator's death."

"So screw up once and you're dead, but it might take a while. Sounds painful." Rahkesh said.

"I didn't say they all _wanted_ us to try to save them." Namach said, grinning.

"So why am I here?"

"I suspected if you dropped into psychic shock you'd be giving off huge amounts of magic. The plants here could absorb it safely. Akren's got too much going on at the moment, you'd have disrupted everything." Namach said, sinking into teacher/lecturer mode. "If someone is giving off magic in psychic shock it _has_ to be taken in by something. It cannot dissipate. If not absorbed by something else it falls back on the person it came from. Typically half of all psychic shock deaths occur this way." Namach fixed Rahkesh with a steady look, "I may have lost two thirds of my students to bloodmagic screw ups but I've never yet lost one to psychic shock Rahkesh. You didn't actually go into psychic shock, but only barely."

"Thanks for getting me out of there then." Rahkesh said, truly grateful. "I hope I didn't mess up the whole MLFC meeting?" That would have been horribly embarrassing.

"The bloodmages present sensed it when Sygra bit you and knocked you out, but no one else noticed."

"Sygra…" Rahkesh turned and stared at his familiar. _You!_

_You needed it. You were going into psychic shock._

_I was?_

_Yes. You were too tired and in too much pain to notice, so I interfered. Aren't you lucky to have me?_

_Yes, yes I am. You couldn't have just told me I was heading for shock?_

_Would you have gone and rested or tried to ignore it?_ Sygra asked coolly. Rahkesh sighed and shrugged, already knowing the answer.

"That _was_ rather dumb." Namach said from across the room. It wasn't hard to guess the cause of the hissing debate and Rahkesh's sheepish look.

"I know, but it was such a crazy idea…" Rahkesh trailed off as Namach broke into a huge grin.

"Yes. Crazy. The elves will be pissed off if we manage it."

"Huh?"

"It's similar to what they did, except they've got a universe, sort of. Well okay not really. I'm not sure what it is…it's just a place. Well, actually, I do know what it is…but never mind that." The ancient vampire rambled for a moment. "They generally look down on earth for our lack of ability to work such large magical projects as a group. The elves do undertakings with millions all the time without any difficulty. Not a single earth species has ever managed anything larger than Australia, not even during the past demon invasions. It will put quite a few elven noses seriously out of joint if we can make this plan work."

"Can we?"

"Certainly." Namach replied calmly. "Why ever not?"

"It's awfully complex."

"And?"

"Do you think anything is magically impossible?" Rahkesh asked in reply. The unusually bright grin he got in response was all the answer he needed. People had been telling Namach things were impossible for three thousand years, and his response was to go and do them anyway. Then the vampire leaned forward a little and got serious.

"It will be a complex undertaking. We have a way to do it, but it will take time. Lots of time. Copying the whole world is not an easy project. It involves getting magic to every single living cell and every bit of nonliving material. That will take a lot of time. While you were getting your beauty sleep we worked out a solution. We'll be sending a picked group back in time to do the work."

"Time travel?"

"Yes."

"How far back?" Rahkesh asked, almost not believing what he was hearing.

"Difficult to say. It's a very complex problem. We'll need to copy everything, put it into this new world, and then stop all outside influence. How long? Hard to tell. At this point the few beings with any knowledge of how this would be done say we'll have to go back close to fourteen thousand years."

Rahkesh just barely managed to keep his mouth shut. Fourteen thousand years? Surely he'd heard wrong! Fourteen _thousand_?

"What?!"

"One hundred years, maybe one hundred and fifty years, of work just to get the world built, then many thousands of years for it to stabilize and begin to function well. It'll be saturated with magic at first, and that will alter things, probably a good deal. With time the magic will be absorbed by plants and animals, turned into a natural cycle, and the world will adjust. Magical flows will even out and become just as they are in this world.

Truly it will be a separate world, but magic will not recognize the difference. Magic will still work in this world and that one. It's just that we're going to remove all magical things from this world when we leave. We copy the world of fourteen thousand years ago, and then in this time remove all magical life from this world to that one. What we can't move we destroy.

With the level of magic necessary for this it will take a very long time for the new world to sort itself out. But it will do so, on its own. As far as anyone knows the amount of magic in existence – the magic we Earthlings use – is correlated only to the mass of all magical life, so that won't be an issue. And even that is merely speculation, speculation which I find highly dubious. I don't think magic has limits. Once we're done magic will _work_ in this world, but all the magic flows here will end once all magic life is removed. There is debate about whether or not this will stop muggles from having magical children. We don't know.

If we go back that far, which is how long this new world will take to absorb the magic used and function, magically, normally, we have a few additional advantages. There'll be fewer humans around and less chance of us impacting anything accidentally during the magical copying. We'll set up magical reaction chains so that events such as volcanic eruptions occur in both worlds, but only naturally triggered ones. We also avoid the question about what to do about human-caused changes to the landscape and muggle cities and such. There won't be any cities to worry over. And, lastly, we can avoid the recent extinctions of sixteen magical species that were rather useful."

"I had no idea such things were possible."

"It's something Cyala has contemplated several times – the going back in time that far part. And the werewolves have often worked on plans for going back far enough to find the original source of lycanthropy. They might be able to cure it if they knew where it came from. Their work is some fairly well designed plans for going back about four thousand years. Cyala is working with their researchers right now. The humans are examining time turner research, but I suspect we won't be using anything that mundane for this. This will require much more than those puny little things. They're only good for a day or so usually, unless enhanced.

The Okata fae once did something similar to find lost magical artifacts that were basically set to magical detonators scheduled to blow up three thousand years after being built. Naturally someone went and lost them without turning them off and the Okata went back in time to get them. And the Russians once considered such a project in conjunction with a take-over-the-world plan. That failed spectacularly when their transport device malfunctioned and killed everyone involved. Actually a lot of people have considered time travel to go back far enough that they'd be able to dominate all other sentient life. A bunch of Romans tried it on orders from the magical community when their empire was falling apart. They did get back a ways, maybe as far as a thousand years, but they all died more or less instantly upon arrival. The location they got dropped off at got messed up and they were dropped off _underground _which killed them all. It's never worked. Probably because they were taking armies back with them. We'll be taking sorcerer researchers, they're smarter than armies."

"But it is possible?"

"Anything is possible." The ancient vampire replied.

The door to the room opened again and this time Nicodemus entered, stopping instantly to scowl at Namach. Rahkesh looked up, and then looked between the two. There was a strange sort of _almost_ animosity in the air that made his skin itch. Nic waited silently, expressionless, not making any effort to appear nonaggressive nor to be overly threatening and somehow managing both. Finally Namach rolled his eyes and got up. Nicodemus moved around the other side of the massive bathtub to get out of his way.

"Don't get your feathers ruffled little bird." Namach said gently, amused, as he walked past him and out the door. Nicodemus watched him leave silently. Then he turned to Rahkesh and stopped when he saw his annoyed look.

"Close the door, you're letting the steam out. Then sit down and tell me what _that_ was about." Rahkesh said firmly. He was surprised when Nic went and closed the door without responding. Nic ignored the chair by the window and instead sat down next to Rahkesh on the marble floor beside the tub. "Well?"

"When you collapsed he brought you and Sygra here. I jumped on the magic and came along." Nic said shortly.

"Impressive, his teleportation stuff is not easy to figure out." Rahkesh said in the same tone of voice. Somehow he thought he wasn't being told something.

"I didn't figure it out, I just hooked onto it. Anyway apparently it gave him enough of a glimpse into my magic that later, when he was making sure your bloodmagic wasn't going crazy, he identified our link." Nic explained. Rahkesh groaned and dropped his head into his left hand.

"How angry was he?"

"Once I explained it was accidental? Not much actually. Before that? He was pretty pissed off. We got into a bit of a fight about it. Apparently it was something about Akren students not doing that or some such. A giant bowl of shit the lot of it." Nic said, and Rahkesh suspected at once that he was getting the abbreviated understated version of events. Xuelhuala, Xariath or whatever Nic was now, Chachapoyaro warriors didn't do _a bit of _a fight.

"No it's not. If you could read my mind it would compromise Akren security. And any link that could be used _against_ a student is a serious issue. Actually Akren alumni and students both avoid forming any sort of magical connection that in any crazy improbable way might somehow inhibit them from acting in Akren's best interests." Rahkesh replied. "We have a saying Nic," he added when Nic went to speak, "Akren trained and Akren loyal. We mean it." Nic scowled but nodded.

"Okay, the Xariath have the same rules. How does this link qualify?"

"It doesn't. What did Namach say once you explained it?" Rahkesh asked. Nic grimaced and looked away. "What?"

"He decided to examine it for himself. That was…unpleasant." Nic sighed. "I have no idea what he did…it didn't hurt all _that_ much…just…Rahkesh I had no idea beings with kind of power existed!" And in that Rahkesh understood. Nicodemus was accustomed to being a Xariath General, in full control and one of the most powerful and respected beings around. "I didn't really try to fight it; I got the idea that would probably result in some serious damage."

"Probably." Rahkesh agreed, though he wasn't so sure. Namach wasn't dumb, he'd have to know that the Chachapoyaro would quite possibly attack him if Nic was injured. "Nic, unless I'm very mistaken no one has ever managed to unravel Namach's teleportation enough to attach to it and follow it before."

"He said as much. Sounded awfully impressed. But he had no trouble reading how much of a magical connection we have."

"He would be good at it – vampires have magical links with those that share their blood. What happened between us was fundamentally unintended bloodmagic. Namach basically invented that area of magic. I think that's standard procedure to examine a link when Akren students accidentally form them. Or intentionally even. He checks the connections of every vampire student at Akren, and he's notorious for utilizing his bloodmagic links, however distant, with other vampires who carry even a tiny bit of his blood. Following bloodmagic is his specialty." Rahkesh explained. Nic looked a little reassured, a little.

"Well, whatever he found was such that your school is not going to be complaining about this." Nic said.

"Of course not. It's not as strong as the links vampire students have with their non-Akren creators, or those shared by some fae and their parents or siblings." Rahkesh said, surprised.

"Apparently it is removable, easily." Nic said.

"Do you want it removed?" Rahkesh asked. "It seems rather useful and I do not mind having it." Actually he was lying through his teeth. He did mind, he minded a lot. Rahkesh's paranoia was shrieking at him to get out of this link. Which was why Rahkesh wanted to keep it. He did truly like having a connection with his old friend, and thought it useful, but just as much he wanted to get a better handle on his response to magical mind links.

"Good, I rather like it as well." Nic said with a relieved smile.

"One more question then; little bird?" Rahkesh asked teasingly. Nic rolled his eyes around a bit.

"I don't know if he was just showing off or what, but apparently thanks to you I may be able to do…what you call an animagus transformation. My people can become animals, but only through feather and stone magic. Not the way the other species do it. In you the animal is a permanent part of you? And you do not need extra stuff to transform?"

"Yes, exactly. Did he say what species?"

"No." Nic sounded annoyed and Rahkesh laughed.

"I'm going to call you "little bird" until you figure it out! But it is a bird? That's great you and Enireth can go flying!" Rahkesh said, "if I can manage to join in without accidentally electrocuting anyone I will, so will Daray and Sharahak." Nic grinned at that idea.

"That sounds like fun. I've always wanted to fly. I imagine it will be very useful too. Although the other Generals might be jealous."

"That depends upon whether to not your species is edible." Rahkesh said grinning. Nic snorted and an enchanted knife appeared in his hand in movement too quick for Rahkesh's eyes to follow.

"He also said that since Chachapoyaro mind magics are more advanced than those of most other species – the magics we are born with I mean, and I am extremely powerful with them, your mind has become very difficult to read. Like with Enireth maybe, my mind magic overflows a bit and provides a bit of a block to anyone reading your mind unless you let them. Not a lot of one, but he said he could definitely sense it. I'm surprised he didn't try to get around it."

"He still might. Except I don't react well to people trying to read my mind. My natural reaction is to attack with everything I've got, even if it means killing myself to gain the extra power from death." Rahkesh explained. Nic looked horrified and he quickly continued, "I can't help it. I just react like that. The idea of someone reading my mind terrifies me enough that I severely, lethally, overreact. And if I die fighting someone out of my mind the Akren Professors think I would also turn all of my magic and the magic from my death into a raw magic mass made of death, aimed at killing the person attacking me, and anyone else it took to wear out the magic. And I can't really stop myself…though I don't _want_ to. I'd prefer to overreact and die. And I think even Tristan Namach would have a very difficult time handling that kind of magical backlash."

Nic was staring at him incredulously. Then he slowly shook his head. "That is rather severe."

"It is."

"Then I will think of it as a very good thing indeed that you have the extra protection." Nic said slowly. "He also added that, assuming my species has not changed much since he met one of us while traveling – that's how he learned our language by the way - our immunities to a few magical poisons humans are susceptible to will also apply to you. The poison's destructiveness is not chemical, it's magical, and so my immunity may possibly protect you as well."

"How sure was he?" Rahkesh asked, wishing Namach had stayed around. This link was apparently much more complex then the Xuelhuala sorcerers had thought it was. A transfer of abilities, especially ones associated with a particular species, was something he'd never heard of. It figured he'd be a good example of it though. _If it is unusual or unheard of, I'll do it accidentally and make it look easy._ Perhaps it was some form of ancient family curse.

"Not very. Just suspicious. Though I think he was very pleased by this." Nic said, wrinkling his nose. "And he was awfully _smug_ about figuring it out. I was not aware your trainers could be so egotistical."

"That's not surprising. I think anything that improves one of his students pleases him." Or anything that proved that he was still the best. Rahkesh decided that now was definitely not the time to mention to Nic that Namach was probably going to ask Rahkesh to apprentice with him after he finished at Akren. Rahkesh knew nothing about any sort of magical connections formed between Master and Apprentice, but he suspected that if this link with Nic would have been a problem Namach might have found a way to get rid of it. Probably while tricking them into thinking it was a good thing somehow.

"Is that vampire a little crazy?" Nic asked after a long pause. Rahkesh had to stop and think before forming a reply.

"Probably not as much as he would like everyone to think. Why?"

"When he tried to examine our link, we, ahh, got into a bit of a fight. I sort-of attacked him" Nic said. Rahkesh raised an eyebrow, Xariath Generals did not sort-of attack. They just attacked. Nic shrugged defiantly at Rahkesh's disbelief. "I punched him. Rather hard. I also simultaneously conjured acid into his face, brought down that fine marble ceiling on his head, tried to tear open his liver with a curse, and magically combusted his skin...well I tried, it grew back so fast I didn't know it had worked until he told me."

Rahkesh paused, thinking he couldn't have heard that right. Nic waited, doing his best impression of a stoic Xariath General. Rahkesh stared for a long moment then started laughing hard, almost sinking under the bath water. Nic scowled at him.

"You people are so _odd. _He thought that this was terribly funny as well. He vaporized it all away, transfigured me into a rabbit and started laughing! Then he complimented me on my conjuring!"

XX

Two hours in a bath reading a book on dueling techniques had left his skin a little prune-ish, enough so that Sygra was hissing in amusement at the state of his toes. Rahkesh ignored her while slipping on his boots. She had berated him for nearly twenty minutes about not looking after his health, pointing out that she did not want to have to find another human and there was no way she was ever settling for being like other snakes. She was fully sentient, and possibly the only one of her species (Rahkesh hadn't found a hint of any evidence of anything else like her ever being observed anywhere).

Sharahak met Rahkesh in the room outside where Rahkesh had been sleeping. Namach's servants (all attractive young females in tight, revealing, clothes, all very intelligent and superbly educated) had set out a meal for them before Rahkesh returned to Akren. Vaeryes was working the bloodmagic students through their training and Namach claimed he really didn't want to get an earful from the Headmistress if Rahkesh and Vaeryes managed to get into a fight. The nasty older bloodmage might respect Rahkesh for his poison-removal bloodmagic capabilities, but he still thought Rahkesh had come too far too fast and was an egotistical brat who needed to be kept in line.

"Did Nicodemus leave?" Sharahak asked at once as Rahkesh took the other chair at the small table on the marble porch overlooking fields of yellow, neon orange, and neon green magical plants.

"He had to get back to Xariath with a report, then start picking out which regiments they're sending where." Rahkesh explained.

"Oh good. I have something for you." Sharahak said, from under one folded wing he withdrew the staff weapon Nic and Xeri had made for Rahkesh. "Don't tell him you managed to break it hmm?" Sharahak suggested, grinning through his fangs. Rahkesh grinned ear to ear and took the staff, Sharahak had fixed it so well he couldn't tell it had ever been damaged.

"You repaired it!" Rahkesh could feel the magic running through the weapon. "Thank you Sharahak, this is amazing!" Sharahak just smiled smugly – demon smug anyway – and continued eating the bloody meat that he considered breakfast. Rahkesh didn't ask what it had been, focused instead on examining the magics of the staff weapon. Satisfied it felt just the same as it ever had he shrunk it and attached it to the inside on his left sleeve.

"Were you at the meeting today?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes. Actually most everyone stayed right through the night before Stocklir sent everyone home at noon." Sharahak said. "You've got everybody thinking up all sorts of plans you know. There's just so much we could do…our own _world_. It's going to be complicated enough building it, then we have to somehow get a society started there. Farms first? Probably, but what sort of set up do we want? For a Government? City planning, divide the planet between species or mix it all? What about species that are rather unique? How about werewolf colonies? Will this new world connect to the muggle one in the upper atmosphere? A world in a world might be different at ground level but what about out into space? Mining rights – the goblins are in a tizzy, which fae in what oceans? The merefolk? Do they get primary rights over all major lakes? There's just so much to think about. Stocklir commented to me that we'll need every expert in every thing anyone could be an expert in to help with this."

"That'll be good though won't it? The more people involved in actively helping the fewer running around panicking about not being able to do anything."

"Stocklir and Minister Bones pointed that out to everyone. But I'm not sure if anything else has been agreed upon." Sharahak said with an eye roll, a habit he'd picked up from his modern vampire friends. Then he thought for a moment "Well actually we do have one thing settled; Namach runs whatever is happening with the vampires, and the vampires better not argue with him about it. He's already got all the City Masters backing him so no complaints from anyone who matters, and anyone who tries anyway, well; a smaller vampire population wouldn't be a bad thing." Sharahak said, snorting a little flame. Rahkesh decided he could have predicted that. The City Masters might collectively be able to get rid of Namach, but they'd have to join forces to do it and vampires didn't share well.

"Having one leader for a species is rarely a good thing, but right now it seems to be useful." Rahkesh agreed. He didn't really care, the vampires could manage themselves. They had to. If they didn't their "prey" species would try to exterminate them, and they already had one war to fight.

"Obviously we don't have half the time we need so some of the planning will have to be done by whomever we send back. Namach explained the time travel?" Sharahak asked.

"Sort of."

"Well everyone who knows anything about it has reached the same conclusion – it is possible, but those who go will not be coming back. They will live out their lives back whenever we send them. And when they're old enough they can't function…at that point they're a strain on the group. So to avoid using time and effort caring for them they'll use a specialized potion, developed by a former Akren potions Professor, which can be altered to kill painlessly while draining all magic and life into raw magic form. To be directed into the building of the new world."

"Everyone who goes will die like that?"

"It seems to be the best option. The best source for the magic we'll need is the amount of magic you get out of a whole magical being. And while we can manage to send people back, we can't bring them back to this time. And if they're old they'll be a drain on those working, so when they can't help they'll have to be willing to accept death. Mind you it is one of the few totally painless deaths known."

"That's a huge sacrifice."

"Yes. And so those people will get the assurance that their families will be the first let into the shelters, since the new world won't be ready for habitation until a while after the demons invade. We're not sure how long yet. We're not going to be able to avoid the invasion. The people who do go will also get direct input into the new governments. When you think about it having your say, possibly over that of the politicians, in the laws of your species new society really is something."

"Yes I suppose it is." Rahkesh agreed. "And all of these people will be experts at one thing or another. Smarter then some politicians I've met. What about those without families?"

"They get to list five people for the shelters." Sharahak explained, which sounded reasonable to Rahkesh. Then Sharahak took a copy of an international human newspaper from the folds of skin behind his wings; Rahkesh's name was in the headline, as a hero "genius". That instantly ruined Rahkesh's morning.

XX

Rahkesh groaned as the tingles finally faded from his legs and his blood started flowing properly again. Seven hours sitting cross-legged made his knees hurt. Actually at the moment a lot of stuff hurt. He had pushed the removal of the wand fragments from his right hand as fast as he could manage. Standing without wobbling too much Rahkesh ended the magics on the floor and left the bloodmagic chamber.

Xanthius, despite the elves non-involvement, had returned to teaching and was working with the upper level bloodmagic students on the schools defenses. Freeing up Namach to plan for the vampire's new lives in the new world, and, apparently, to monitor Rahkesh. Though if Xanthius was working with the students then how did so many of them wind up watching his last bit of bloodmagic? Rahkesh wondered as he exited the chamber entrance room to find eleven people there.

"The Bloodmages Guild was interested, and with them Akren-trained the headmistress let them watch." Haedil said softly from behind Rahkesh's shoulder. He was effectively standing between Rahkesh and the bloodmages. Rahkesh raised a curious eyebrow as the fae took his elbow and turned him away from them and towards the showers.

"Something I should know about?"

"One of them is on the fae Council…and was also there a year ago." Haedil said reluctantly. "There are other people doing bloodmagic work in this wing today Rahkesh, if you feel like confronting him do it elsewhere."

"And so someone asked you to make sure he and I didn't get into a fight?" Rahkesh asked. The bloodmagic chambers were just about impervious to any outside influence, so the concern seemed a little unwarranted. Haedil shrugged and nodded, he must have drawn the short straw, or lost a bet.

"Yeah."

"The lack of faith in my ability to keep my temper in check hurts." Rahkesh drawled. Haedil rolled his eyes and twitched his pointed ears. It looked ridiculous. Rahkesh laughed and ignored the bloodmages behind him, intent on a shower to wash off the blood and make his body stop aching.

His right hand hurt, but the pain was already fading and Rahkesh couldn't stop himself from whistling while he washed. The last fragments of his old wand were gone and his magic was working itself out of the knots it had been tied in. He could already feel his magic soaring through him normally again and it felt amazing.

_Can we go flying then?_ Sygra asked from her spot, wrapped around the top of the shower door.

_Yes!_ Rahkesh hissed back. It was late fall and he could feel a storm brewing outside. Lots of rain, but with just a little energy he could tip it into a thunderstorm easily. He had pushed the rituals to remove the wand fragments as close to together as he possibly could, cutting a full eighteen hours out of the process. Namach had shown him (and the class) how to do some fine-tuned sensing work to determine precisely when they were recovered enough from one bloodmagic piece to do the next.

Not terribly surprisingly this precise work had been fairly easy for Rahkesh and over the course of all the rituals it had taken to remove the wand fragments he'd gotten good enough to sense to within an hour of when he was ready. Namach had kept a close watch on all of his bloodmagic work to make sure he didn't overdo it. The vampire professor could sense to within half a minute when any person's bloodmagic had totally recovered from a ritual. That sort of precision was extremely difficult because recovering from a ritual was not an all-or-nothing thing, it happened slowly in tiny bits. Sensing bloodmagic that keenly was probably well beyond what Rahkesh could learn even with another decade of work, but he was satisfied with what he had managed.

Rahkesh had, however, failed miserably at reading anyone else's bloodmagic in the same manner – he couldn't tell at all where another person was in recovering from a piece of bloodmagic work. He could only do his own, but that was all he needed to do. Especially since he could now add his work at removing the old wood fragments to the list of bloodmagic work he had accomplished. It was something that had never really been done before and Rahkesh had proved his method was very effective.

In fact what he had accomplished was new enough that Namach had suggested he work on publishing a description of what he had done and how the magics had worked. The Bloodmages Guild ran three separate bloodmagic publications, one each for the Black Order, the White Order, and the Grays. Rahkesh's wand had been disintegrated and turned into an entirely magical form before being imbedded in living human tissues, something that apparently didn't happen often, if ever. As a result there had been no established procedure for dealing with it. Therefore what Rahkesh had done would probably be extremely impressive to the Guild, and to healers. Between this and the bloodmagic he had done to force his friends into silence about where he was and what he was doing, plus a few minor bloodmagic warding experiments that had worked moderately well, he had some fairly impressive bloodmagic work that was _not_ related to self-improvements – which were often the easiest form of bloodmagic for beginners. With a few more years of work, if Rahkesh didn't manage to die first, he would probably have little difficulty passing the Guild's requirements (half of which were unknown until you took the practical test) and becoming a bloodmage. If there still was a Guild by the time the war with the demons was over.

Reaching out a little, tentatively, Rahkesh sought out and found the Life Crystal that he was very delicately attached to. In between rituals he had been very busy, and had formed his own Life Crystal. There was a process for creating extremely individualized ones; Rahkesh had used the blood of all his three physical forms (human, basilisk and thunderbird) plus the magic of each. He had formed it during a thunderstorm and allowed the crystal, when still liquid, to be struck by lightning before hardening it. In the center of the crystal were a few human tears, his basilisk venom, and a powdered thunderbird feather. His link to it allowed him to draw on it at any time, and it was individualized enough that using it against him would be difficult if not impossible. Finding that his recent bloodmagic work had not affected the crystal Rahkesh put the link away, and at once sensed a vampiric presence enter the room and take one of the showers.

"That you Rahkesh?" Daray's voice came from one of the other showers.

"Yeah, you finished early." Rahkesh commented. Daray, like very other bloodmagic student in the school, was pushing himself hard to complete as many rituals as possible before the demons invaded. Daray was not particularly good at timing his rituals, not as precise as Rahkesh was. Instead he seemed to be very good at adapting a little bit while building the runes for his ritual, in the chamber itself, to match where he was in recovering from his previous ritual. This was considerably more dangerous but it seemed to work for Daray. It was similar to how Namach had worked in inventing most of the more standardized bloodmagic rituals and the ancient vampire had been monitoring Daray's progress as much as he was Rahkesh's.

"The headmistress and the Alumni Association are opening some of the mountain fortresses and moving alumni into them." Daray said. Rahkesh nervously cast a wandless drying spell on his hair and was delighted when he only felt a brief stab of pain.

"I'm heading back to the MLFC later to see what's happening with the planning for the new world. Do we have any alumni going back in time yet?" Rahkesh asked.

"I have no idea." Daray said, dressing himself again with a blip of magic. Rahkesh remembered that he was going to have to get a new wand. The sooner the better if he wanted to get used to it before he had to fight with it. "My aunt, Miram, is going. She's a potions master, a second rank Threadmage, and a herbologist."

Rahkesh wondered what Cyala thought of that. To his knowledge there were only fifteen or so members of the Ateres family. Losing one was quite a sacrifice given their training. Then again, Namach had said that Cyala had experimented with time travel, and no one knew Cyala's actual age, or how her half-sister (biological) had somehow wound up centuries younger than Cyala. That ought to be impossible without some sort of time travel. So maybe Cyala had some plan ready for Miram. He wondered if Daray knew anything about that, and then decided that Daray would probably not want him asking about family secrets.

"So now that your magic isn't screwed up anymore, have you thought about a new wand?" Daray asked.

"I have a bunch of possible wand parts." Rahkesh said. The same things that worked well in bloodmagic knives worked in wands, so he had plenty of unusual things around. "I'll find an alumnus who makes wands and ask for some advice."

"Professor Coro teaches wand making." Daray reminded him. The doors to the showers opened and Ally came in, helping and exhausted looking werewolf.

"Next time you collapse do try not to land _on_ me." Ally said crossly. Though almost unrecognizable through all the blood covering his face the werewolf's hoarse bark of a laugh identified him at once as Matolo.

"What happened to you?" Rahkesh asked.

"I think I pushed that one a little too far." Matolo said, dropping his robe on a bench and heading for one of the showers.

"He almost didn't make it." Ally told them. "How did your last ritual go?"

"Great." Rahkesh said, with a slightly goofy grin. "Now I can finally go make a new wand."

"Just ask Professor Coro about it." Daray said.

"She's a threadmage." Rahkesh grumbled. Ally snickered.

"She was first trained as a wand maker. Therefore I'm sure she can ignore your…issues…with threadmagic." Daray said, grinning at Rahkesh's growl. "and it'll go faster with her help since the alumni are moving around and getting organized."

Daray was right of course, and so two days later Rahkesh and Professor Coro, an elegant woman whose short afro was full of long lines of colorful strings tied into intricate knots and chains, were working through Rahkesh's possible wand pieces. Professor Coro had requested advice from the headmistress on creating wands for people with more than one animal form and had gotten a response that for an individual with multiple forms they would need something from each, if they wanted a highly individualized wand. Which meant Nvara Aelfly needed a new wand every time she managed another animagus form, at the present she had anywhere from eight to eleven depending upon who you asked.

"I suppose it would be difficult for you to get a heartstring out of your basilisk form. Too bad, basilisk heartstrings really are stringy. They can be worked into threadmagic forms around other pieces to fill the wand." Professor Coro said, and Rahkesh resisted the urge to point out that threadmagic _anything_ was out of the question.

"Well, some part will have to be liquid. No air spaces. It's what I needed to do for my bloodmagic knives. I think the difference between the ways substances move electricity causes problems."

"Air spaces in general are a bad idea unless they're miniscule, such as the tiny bit of air in a feather when it's compressed into a wand." Professor Coro agreed. "I would suggest using your human blood as the liquid. And solid parts from each of your animal forms.

"A feather then." Rahkesh said, "what sort?" He asked, gesturing to a spread of six feathers, one of them a meter long. He had gotten his thunderbird form as small as possible, but the tail and wing feathers were still huge. He'd had to shrink it to get it that small.

"Not a tail feather, too long. Nothing from the belly; that doesn't give off lightning, nor get struck by it when you fly. Try one from the top of the head." Professor Coro said. Rahkesh picked one that had a gold shine to it and which seemed to have more miniature thunderstorms roiling around inside of it then the others. Professor Coro wisely avoided looking at any of the feathers for more than a second, and never looked too closely. The swirling storm masses in them had some weird effects on the mind. They either hypnotized or sucked in the mind until you couldn't look away, then you couldn't _hear _anything but the storm, or see anything else, and then your magic started to change, eventually creating an actual storm and killing you. Thunderbird feathers were some of the most dangerous naturally occurring objects in existence. Rahkesh thought they were pretty.

"Basilisk fang would be best for fighting or larger magical undertakings. A scale won't fit unless powdered, but the scales are strong and with your blood it would be a very strong wand, difficult to break. An eye would give tremendous killing power. A piece of bone would be almost as strong as a scale and more efficient then the others." Professor Coro explained.

"I'm not losing an eye, and I don't need that kind of killing power." Rahkesh said, and something Namach had said a year before came back to him_most of your magic is centered around survival and fighting. However I find it very interesting that the runes on your back indicate that you also could be very good at large-scale nonviolent magical undertakings._Rahkesh considered the value of using bone versus fang. Fang would be more like what his bloodmagic indicated him to be good at (though how it "indicated" this he didn't know) but then maybe bone would be better because it would help with other stuff? "I think, I think a fang sliver would be best."

"Will that hurt much?" Professor Coro asked.

"No. I already took a few. And it regrows just fine." Rahkesh had let the healers to the removal, and they had been highly interested when his fang had regrown. Now they were asking to actually remove one instead of taking off little slices.

"Really? I don't think I've ever heard of a snake that could regrow teeth."

"My basilisk-self can." Rahkesh said with a shrug.

"Now the hardest part. What wood do we use? I have a large collection of samples you can look through." Professor Coro said, opening a door in the back of her office. Inside were several storerooms filled with wand parts. Rahkesh had a good idea of what wood he wanted to use; the elven blood tree growing at his house had just reached four meters tall. Plenty large enough to get some wood from and the tree would probably heal itself. But he went and looked at Professor Coro's stock anyway. He might find something even better.

Two hours later Professor Coro was frustrated and Rahkesh had given up. Though he'd found some interesting connections to a few species none of them would work. Now he had to figure out what to do about the blood tree. No one knew about it, and Rahkesh was concerned about the reactions he'd get.

Ever since finding out that Dyalnos trees belonged in the elf realm he'd been frightened of letting anyone know he had one. He'd found potions in a few obscure books using parts of the tree, and Mr. Fleming, the potions supplier he had been selling rare potions ingredients to for a year, had some sap from a blood tree. But apparently the elves limited how much trade they did with their favorite tree species. And seeds, Rahkesh imagined, were never given to humans. Which really made him wonder where the ones in the Potter family vault had come from. There had been a half dozen of them, enormously valuable. Rahkesh had transferred most of the stuff from the Potter vaults to other accounts he'd set up, then removed everything from those vaults and put it all into the Gringotts account he had under his current name. Then he'd cancelled the earlier accounts, while leaving the Potter family account with a good sum of money and still active. He'd also paid an Akren alumnus goblin banker to remove any record of the existence of his intermediate accounts, and to mix up the amounts of money.

"I'm really not sure what to do at this point. It seems to me you will probably need to grow your own tree for the wood, so it will be tied to you." Professor Coro said.

"I think I know what to do then." Rahkesh said, "can you show me how to get a piece of wood from a tree?"

"Sure, what tree do you want to use?"

"I have a tree of my own, but I'd like to practice the spells a bit. Any tree would be fine." Rahkesh said.

"Very well. I'm going to collect ironwood this afternoon with the class, how about you come along?"

Professor Coro's wand making class existed in both a semester-long class and in optional seminars. Students who didn't have time to take the actual class could pick up all the needed knowledge and take the tests by attending the seminars, sometimes taking several years to get all the material. Anyone wanting to go further than basic stuff had to actually take a full class, but basic wood harvesting was much the same for all tree species.

Rahkesh was dismayed to learn that the best possible way to remove a piece of wood from the trunk of a tree without harming it too much was with threadmagic. There was also a spell for it, but it was extremely difficult without a wand. And so Rahkesh watched enviously while the rest of the class extracted pieces of wood from various trees with threadmagic, while Rahkesh fought his way through learning the spell wandlessly.

"This is really just a little sad." Rianae commented later that evening. Watching Rahkesh, who was staring at a large branch, trying to remove a piece of wood from the interior. Rianae was sitting cross-legged on Rahkesh's bed, pulling neat perfectly formed pieces of wood out of a log, using bits of bright yellow thread.

"Thank you madam threadmage." Rahkesh grouched.

"I really don't think that spell was ever meant to be done wandlessly." Silas pointed out. He was curled up in an armchair he'd conjured, with Nuri wrapped up in a tight little ball of black fur on the floor.

"Most wand spells were never meant to be done wandlessly." Ally said, "That's why they were designed for _wands_."

Rahkesh blinked and stopped what he was trying to do. "Why the hell didn't I think of that? You don't ever replicate wand magic wandlessly because it doesn't work well. You come up with something on your own."

"And more straightforward." Ally reminded him. "Wandless magic is no-frills, simple and straightforward."

"But it will never work as well as threadmagic." Rianae said. "Rahkesh how about you just let me do it?"

Rahkesh grimaced. He didn't know what he was going to do about explaining what kind of wood it was, and so letting Rianae know what kind of tree it was might be a bad idea

"Thanks for the offer, but the tree is question I already tied to me by blood." Rahkesh sighed, rubbing his eyes.

"Now _that's_ a brilliant idea." Daray said, looking up from his textbook. The dark vampire was occupying the entire couch, except for the back, where Satan was perched. "Find a suitable tree species, get a seedling and feed it your blood. I think I'll have to go do that tomorrow. What sort of tree Rahkesh?"

Rahkesh glared down at the piece of wood sitting on his desk and didn't respond. How did he always seem to wind up in this sort of mess? He must have done something truly terrible in a previous life. How was he supposed to explain a bloodtree? _It was in my family vault, a family which I don't have. Er yeah, that vault, the one from the family of my former alter-ego less then a dozen people know about. Nothing odd about this. How'd seed from a tree the elves kill you for looking at wrong end up in the Potter family vault? Huh, good question. I have no idea, yes really. Yeah, they're gonna believe that. Oh and it accepted my blood and I'm using it to make a wand. No need to be suspicious or upset. Do elves even let you make wands out of that species? And of course it looks odd enough no one will ever believe it to be anything normal. People will always be asking questions. How do I always manage to do this to myself?_

He was going to have to go ask Professor Namach about this one. The elves were going to be pissed. And that meant pissy death dragons. The headmistress was going to _skin_ him alive. If there was anything left after Namach got done. Damn. Maybe if he was lucky he'd get out of the coma before he died of old age.

XX

Rahkesh walked into the elaborate office with its gilded furniture and looked around warily. Eli the giant magical frill-necked lizard was basking in the sun. Professor Namach was reclined on a marble couch that had soft a dark red seat made from looked like a very thick satin quilt, with rubies attached to a silver fringe.

"You feel concerned." The vampire drawled, putting the pile of papers he was reading into a red folder. "Why does this bother me?"

"Because you know me?" Rahkesh asked weakly. Namach sighed and sat up.

"Yes, which is why I suspect whatever you're up to now will be highly amusing." The vampire said, and Rahkesh was rather surprised to note that he was actually grinning little. Well at least someone thought his messed up existence was amusing. He certainly didn't.

"I'm so glad to know I keep you entertained." Rahkesh muttered, not sounding at all glad. "I've been trying to make a new wand." Rahkesh said, sitting down in a plush armchair across the massive gem-encrusted coffee table. It was about as far from the vampire was he could physically get and still be polite. Just in case.

"You haven't crafted one yet?" Namach asked, sounding a little surprised.

"I had some trouble finding the right wood to use. I've found it now."

"What species?" Namach asked curiously.

"I had to grow the tree myself, feeding it my blood so it would be tied to me."

"That will take a while."

"It would, but I already have a tree. I planted it a while ago and I've been feeding it my blood, enhanced with a growth potion. It's large enough to get enough wood from."

"That was smart of you." Namach said approvingly. "It's always good to have a compatible tree handy. They can be used for a lot of things."

"That's what I was thinking…originally." Rahkesh said glumly.

"So what's the problem?" Namach asked. Rahkesh shifted and the vampire's dark silver gazed sharpened. "Rahkesh, what _species_ is this tree?"

"Uh well…" Rahkesh trailed off_ best just tell him_. Namach's eyes were starting to get unnerving. "It's a Dyalnos tree."

In her office Nvara spun around just in time to watch the hills on the far side of the valley turn to solid ice.

-

-

Please review. The demons will begin their attack in the next chapter. I just had to clear up a few things first.

Preview for next chapter - an individual Harry Potter knew at Hogwarts joins the time travel team. The demons get tricky, Nvara gets pissed off, Cyala is diabolical, centaurs have dreams of world domination, Rahkesh learns what the best stress therapy ever invented is, and the Bloodmages and Necromancers have FUN.


	29. Chapter 29

Chapter 29

"YOU DID _WHAT_?!?" The lights went out, the walls cracked and froze and the windows turned to ice. Rahkesh collapsed out of his chair, hands over his ears at the enraged roar. Opening his eyes he looked around, finding only total blackness. Oh shit.

"Not intentionally!" Rahkesh gasped out hurriedly, fighting his urge to fight back. Damn this was going to hurt. And it wasn't like he'd known what a bloodtree really was when he'd planted the damn thing! He stomped down the urge to transform.

"Not intentionally? Not intentionally! YOU DO NOT GROW A BLOODTREE _ACCIDENTALLY_!" Namach raged. Black magic flashing around him in a whirlwind that pulled Rahkesh's breath away and seared his skin. Rahkesh groaned softly, choking back a scream as Namach's flaring magic burned across him.

The magic ate at him, ripping into his magic and destroying it. The electrified air around him burned away and a bone-deep fire began making him feel like he was being burned alive. With his magic useless and unable to move Rahkesh fought the pain as his internal organs start to feel like they were burning.

The ice windows shattered as Eli smashed his head through one then leaped into the room. Racing across the frozen floor with blinding speed the lizard launched himself at his Master, rose onto his hind legs, and bit his arm.

"ELI!"

The big lizard hissed and rattled his frill. Namach picked him up and moved him aside as if he weighed nothing. But the distraction was enough that Rahkesh's ears stopped ringing and his vision cleared and his mind stopped throbbing enough for him to think. His skin felt like it was on fire and the pain was almost enough to make him collapse again, but he had to do something, he only had a few seconds.

Namach was unlikely to actually kill him. And the ancient vampire appreciated strength and defiance, to a limit, so long as it wasn't working against him or from a vampire likely to fight him. And Namach knew he _could_ kill Rahkesh. Rahkesh knew it too and never hid that he knew it. Knew it like he knew the sun would rise the next day. That fact alone made Namach more tolerant. And Namach only ever tolerated those who were rational; he saw nothing wrong with killing idiots, but Rahkesh _had_ done research before planting that tree, through Akren's entire library. And so Namach could not blame him for what wasn't in the library – that would be too irrational for the vampire to ever do it.

Rahkesh closed down every mind magic he had ever developed and focused, focused harder then he ever had. Accepting all the pain from his burning skin and not stopping the rest of the enraged magic from crashing into him. Instead Rahkesh accepted it and moved through it, fighting to not react to the pain. Feeling like his blood was freezing he forced himself to his feet. Planting himself solidly, mind aching and his whole body hurting Rahkesh dropped the layers and layers of walls that kept back his soul and let it run free. Power flowed and furious raging defiance screamed through his heart. Magic crackled and flared. Unknown to Rahkesh his eyes shifted, turning into pools of flaring golden thunderstorms.

Forcing himself to move Rahkesh stepped forward, and though two inches shorter he looked the furious vampire straight in the eye, bracing himself against the white silver and gold magic.

"Well apparently your source for that knowledge is incorrect." Rahkesh said coldly. "Because when I planted that seed I had read every book on bloodtrees that Akren has and not one mentioned that growing them is a problem for Earthlings."

As he spoke Eli began to hum loudly and the ice coating everything began to melt. Namach pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed slowly. When he spoke the vampire's voice was almost impossible to understand behind the rumbling growl. "Problem? No, no of course it's not a _problem_. If you don't count the elves killing you and everyone you've ever spoken to a _problem_!"

"They can't kill me for not knowing they'd be upset. It's not like they advertise that they'll kill anyone who grows a Dyalnos tree." Rahkesh said. Namach's magic was starting to fade and he hurt. Hurt like the first time he'd experienced a cruciatus curse.

Namach blinked, stared at Rahkesh incredulously, blinked again, shook his head, and started laughing. Loud deep laughs that made Rahkesh's ears ring. Rahkesh looked over at Eli, who was looking at his Master like he thought he'd gone mad. Great, the lizard agreed with him. This was not a good sign.

"Make that argument before an elven court Rahkesh, but tell me when so I can watch." Namach said, still laughing.

"I'm glad you're amused, I'm not." Rahkesh said, feeling that he was starting to shake a little in reaction to being swamped with angry magic. His eyes were watering with the lingering agony, but he forced back any tears, now was not a time to show any weakness.

"Oh I am amused. I had always wished to be around the day the Earth was destroyed!" Namach said. Not unhappily. "Very well Rahkesh, go make a wand out of that tree, then we'll deal with the elves!"

"DAMN IT TRISTAN!" The door slammed open and Nvara Alefly strode into the room, silver cloak flashing around behind her. The magical torches relit and the plants hanging from the ceiling finally began to admit light again. The headmistress was surrounded in an ethereal shimmering energy, Rahkesh, still not daring to use the magic it would take to figure out what she was doing, thought it looked like very powerful warding magic.

"What?" The vampire asked sarcastically. Rahkesh backed away quickly and sat back down, dropping his head into his hands. His brain hurt.

"I'm certain there is a very good reason why half the valley has been frozen over." Nvara hissed.

"No it's not." Namach growled, irritated. Nvara paused and looked out the window; the valley showed no sign of having ever been frozen.

"Explain."

"Our overly accomplished student here," the vampire snarled, gesturing to Rahkesh with a grimace "apparently thought it would be an interesting experiment to grow a _bloodtree_." He looked up in time to have the satisfaction of seeing Nvara go pale. The vampire grinned wide enough to show off both fangs. "Brilliant isn't he? I'd expect their army to start showing up about ten seconds after they hear about its existence. Should be fun eh?" Now Namach did not sound so amused.

"Rahkesh?" Nvara asked softly.

"There was nothing in the library saying that this would be a problem." Rahkesh said stiffly, "and I imagine killing it would just make things worse."

"Most definitely" Namach said, "you'd lose your soul over that."

"Does anyone else know?" Nvara asked. Rahkesh took a slow breath and readied himself for this next part. He was still in pain, but he wasn't about to back down, not about this.

"No. But I am going to use it to make a wand." Rahkesh said. The headmistress spun around to stare at him.

"No you're not."

"Yes. And if the elves come after me then they do. It's their own damn fault for not making sure everyone knew they didn't approve."

"Rahkesh you are not making a wand from that tree!"

Rahkesh had never thought there'd be a day when he'd refuse an order from Akren's headmistress, but he saw no reason not to go forward with his plan.

"Yes, I am. I am not going to go cower and wait for the elves to find out about it. If they want to try to stop me they can damn well come and stop me themselves, I'll not stop just for fear of them. I do not know how the seeds for Dyalnos trees came to be in my family vault but they are mine, the tree has accepted my blood. If the elves like trees so much _they_ can dispute that tree's choice, I'll not."

Namach started chuckling again. "Clever. That argument might just work."

"What?" Nvara said disbelievingly.

"Dyalnos trees aren't actually sentient, but they're pretty damn close. The magic in them is about as intelligent as that of a house cat, and every bit as independent." Namach explained.

"And the elves are apparently, for some _unexplained reason_" Rahkesh glared at Namach and deliberately ignored the warning growl "are probably going to attack me anyway. I might as well give them a reason right?" He really needed to get out of the room, his hurt horribly and his kidneys were still feeling like they were burning. His arm and leg bones were aching enough to leave him short of breath and his spine felt like he had brands pressed to every vertebrae. Neither of the Professors seemed to notice.

"Of course." Namach said, he was smiling again. Rahkesh was really wondering about his sanity. "Go make that wand Rahkesh, the elves will sort themselves out just fine."

"You will damn well _not_ be doing that in this valley!" Nvara snapped.

"Of course not." Namach agreed. "That really would set them off. Do it at home, let no one else know about it until after. The elves always go on and on about how rational they are, let them prove it by not trying to annihilate Akren."

"You can't think you can actually fight them off." Nvara said to Rahkesh. Rahkesh shook his head.

"No. But I am really, really, sick of being frightened of a bunch of creatures I've hardly met. If the elves really do inhabit multiple universes and planets there have to be a lot of them. Surely _some_ of them will understand the ridiculousness of the death dragons going apeshit over some silly little human, who means them no harm at all, doing something accidentally." Rahkesh pointed out. This time Nvara sighed and grinned a little lopsidedly.

"I suppose I could have predicted that response. You didn't get into this school on account of your _grades_ after all. Very well, go make that wand and we'll deal with our alien friends later."

"You don't think they'll go after anyone else?" Rahkesh asked Namach. That was the only thing that he was really concerned with. His arms were starting to shake and he folded them tightly across his chest, trying to draw up wandless healing magic. But he felt strangely exhausted and the agony in his back was distracting him.

"They might. If so it would only be Akren. And this place…I'd like to see them try." Namach said, grinning. "They're not gods, though they probably wish they were."

"Tristan." Nvara warned. "Yes we could hold them off, no, not for very long."

"I've already come up with a perfectly logical reason why they shouldn't kill Rahkesh for what he's slowly turning into – and don't glare at me Thunder if you knew what it was you'd be comatose for years – I'm sure however furious they are going to be about that this will not be worse." Namach explained. "If they're really bent out of shape about it Rahkesh might have to let them do a mind reading to determine if he's being honest about not knowing how possessive they are of those bloodtrees."

"No way." Rahkesh hissed alarmed enough to almost forget the searing pain his skin was using to tell him how bad the damage was.

"If you want to live you'll have to. That's the only way I see you getting out of this alive." Namach replied. "And even that's unlikely. Your final transformation alone will make them want you dead. It isn't often that the elves actually just go and kill, usually someone has to actually act against them first. You might be an exception to that. So if you want to get away with that tree of yours it'll take a lot of convincing."

"They are _not_ reading my mind!"

"I doubt you can avoid it. And when they do it you won't be able to escape by dying." Namach warned him. Rahkesh grimaced and looked away. He really hated having anyone read his mind.

"As long as they stay out of my school." Nvara sighed. "Though I suppose that's a useless effort. I never I thought I'd see the Akren alumni united about anything, but the demons - killing a mutual enemy – has really gotten a change of perspective. I wonder if they'll go after the elves when _they_ go after you?"

"Would asking them not to work?" Rahkesh asked. From the way Namach had just flinched having the alumni attack in retaliation would not go over well.

"It had better. We might yet get you out of this alive, but the last time anyone actually attacked an elf we lost a fairly good chunk of the human population. The average elf will probably not object too much to letting you live, but they _all_ get up in arms about anyone attacking them. We only got your friend Alexia off because that was during a training exercise and the patrol leader approved of her attack."

"You've attacked them more than once." Nvara pointed out.

"Yes, but that was _me_. The elves _like_ me." Namach said smugly. "I spent some time in their realm. Not voluntarily but I was stuck there for a while. They know me. I dare say a great many of them are rather fond of me."

"You are certain you want to go through with this?" Nvara asked Rahkesh. Rahkesh nodded. As much as he feared the thought of having the elves read his mind, he just didn't have it in him to back down, not over this. He was already annoyed enough that he might somehow incur the elves' wrath simply for becoming something he couldn't stop himself from being, he didn't care overly much about their protectiveness about some _tree_.

"Go make that wand then. And tell no one." Nvara said. Rahkesh left quickly, shutting the door behind him.

Outside the hallway he sorted through the small potions vials in his pocket until he found a pain reliever. Drinking it Rahkesh decided he was not _ever_ giving Namach a reason to actually attack him. Just being present when the vampire was that angry was painful enough. Drawing a stuttering breath he leaned against the wall and finally allowed himself to show the agony a little, rubbing at his hurting arms. The touch did nothing but make both his palms and arms hurt bad enough to bring tears to his eyes and make him gasp in pain.

Definitely not ever giving Namach a reason to actually attack. Not ever. Finally beginning to truly shake and feeling as though he was starting to go into shock Rahkesh hurried back to his room. In the future, he'd be doing more research before getting into anything involving the elves or unusual bloodmagic.

As soon as the door had closed Nvara turned back to the vampire. "Well?"

"The demons are attacking several of the elves planets. And while the elves have a great many advantages, the demons have sheer numbers. And their arch demons." Namach said.

"The demons haven't been a serious threat to the elves for a long time."

"Not really. The demons will never manage to destroy them all. That's what almost happened in their last universe and the elves have changed a lot since then, as a species. They're well beyond the demons now. They've driven the demons off several of the planets they invaded. However all of the elves' best are off on the other side of the galaxy, and even a death dragon can't just hop between planets, much less across a galaxy. It'll take them time to get here."

"So how many are likely to notice when Rahkesh finally transforms?" Nvara asked.

"The ones stationed here are few enough that I and my servants can fight them to draw if we must. It'll cost a few lives to do it, but it can be done. If I can stop them from killing him immediately I can get them to talk. If I can do that then I know I can talk them out of killing him. Their reason for doing so isn't sound, they'll react on instinct, but once they stop enough to think they'll have to give it up."

"And the tree?"

"A bloodtree doesn't accept the blood of just _anyone_. Rahkesh is correct when he thinks that that will matter. It will. But they'll demand a mind reading, more likely a full soul reading. And with an elf doing it Rahkesh won't be able to go die, as is his usual escape method. They'll do it because they'll want to know who he is. I'm looking forward to that, once they've read his soul they'll probably wind up liking him, rather a lot actually. It won't hurt Earth to have another being around that the elves appreciate. They like Stocklir, though she doesn't know it, but Earth could use a real fighter that the elves like."

Nvara shook her head a little, Earth had enough species running around getting into scuffles and disagreements, alien life forms really didn't need to be adding to their problems. "Very well, do let me know what the big day is, I want to watch. And when it's all done with, if Rahkesh lives, I will be paying a visit to one of the elven Earth bases, to demand reparations to Akren for the waste of a student and a Professor's time."

"Now that _I _want to watch."

"I have a job to do and I do not appreciate alien life forms with no actual right to Earth interfering. They had damn well better repay us for the lost time, never mind the probable brain trauma Rahkesh will put himself through during that mind reading. If he winds up with so much as a bloody nose the elves are going to be here on Earth for the next century improving Akren's border magics!"

"I will make sure they know that."

"Do you think Rahkesh will be terribly upset when he realizes the end result of this is going to be not only him getting torn to bits, but you as well?" Nvara asked.

"Probably. I'm counting on it." The vampire said, smiling. Nvara grimaced.

"And, of course, you get a virtual certainty that Rahkesh will become your next apprentice."

"Of course" Namach grinned wolfishly, "it might be my duty as a teacher to defend him, but he doesn't think like that. He'd never agree to be my next apprentice right now, he's too damn independent. Assuming he survives this I doubt he'll have any problem agreeing."

"You're going to have your hands full with this one." Nvara warned, wondering just a little if Namach wasn't biting off a bit more then he could chew.

"Students like Rahkesh, or Daray, are the reason teaching is so much fun. And after training my dear polite well-mannered Hadrian, a scrappy feral thunderbird will be very entertaining indeed."

XX

A life lived plotting one moment to the next, trying to find a path to survival, is not really a life at all. Life lived balancing two halves of a major war doesn't have much to it except being just one step ahead of everyone else. And when the war is over, when all the combatants are dead and many completely forgotten, that life has little left to show for it.

Wealth, he had that. Which really wasn't much when there was little left to do. His war was finished, and no one really cared anymore what the fight had been over. All the lives lost, all those who had died fighting so fiercely for ideas they thought were so important…and none of it really mattered anymore. It had barely been thirty years, and it was all over and all the dead would not be coming back to realize just how small their world had really been, how shortsighted and unaware their lives had been. How little they had died for. Lofty ideals and dreams people had dedicated their entire existence to, mattered not a bit just a few years later.

Oddly, it was being forgotten, rather than winning, which had given him freedom. He'd never had much of that. Now that he had it, he had to make decisions. He'd never really had to do that.

Or he had, but not this sort. Before it had only been life-or-death choices over what to tell to whom and when, and to be careful that every word and action fit his carefully crafted armor. To know when to speak up, when to stay silent. Sure, he'd had the freedom to choose what to say and when, what skills to learn that might keep him alive. Maybe he'd even had the freedom to believe, but only in one of two very heavily limited options.

Now he could do whatever he wished. It was liberating, but without direction. Strangely, freedom, which he had once longed for, left him without any path. He'd never made goals, never thought he'd live long enough to start on any. And now he didn't know what to do.

He had skills enough to do a great deal. But he didn't really know what, or where. He had his freedom, he could go anywhere, do most anything. But what he really wanted was a purpose. And a path that he had chosen himself, without outside forces conspiring to push him forward. Now that he had freedom there were so many options.

But there was only one dream. A dream cooked up by some ambitious eighteen-year-old human/thunderbird/basilisk cross breed. A dream of a new world for magical life forms that neatly solved their demon problem, all the problems of international law, all the problems of interspecies-relations (they could _start over_), and their muggle problem, the major problems they had struggled with for thousands of years.

They could start everything anew, and get it right. Maybe, but the politicians weren't going to be as involved as they probably thought they were. There were too many other powerful players in the game, and they mattered more than politicians. In a way, the war would ensure that the right people got to be heard. And this new world would find a way to heal the scars of the old - or just ignore them, it would find a way to allow everyone to coexist simply because everyone was needed and there was no other choice.

The chance to _build_ a world. Now that was a dream he could freely choose to get behind. That it would require the rest of his life to complete, and he would probably never see it, didn't weigh on his decision very much. He had more faith that things would turn out okay now than he ever had in anything. He wanted a cause to work for, and if took the rest of his life, so much the better. He would be too busy to think much about the past. It would be such a drastic change…to work on a purely magical endeavor, creating a whole new world. No politics, no backstabbing, spying, fighting, killing, no struggling to survive on both sides of a major war. Just an immense magical undertaking that could occupy him entirely for the rest of his life.

He needed challenges, and this was the ultimate challenge. To create a world, a world of _magic_. To have a hand in its development, to make decisions about what it would be like. It was better then anything he'd ever expected to die with, and certainly far more then he deserved. To create a world, to be one of the founders of a _world_.

There was a soft knock on the door, and moment later it opened and Minerva glanced in.

"Are you about finished?" She asked gently. He tilted his head towards the seven simmering cauldrons.

"Ten minutes to finish cooling. Then you can use it."

"Thank you Severus." He didn't respond, and she didn't expect a response. She watched him finish packing, shifting a little from foot to foot. "I don't suppose there's anything I could do to get you to stay is there?"

"No."

"What will you do now?" Minerva asked. He took the newspaper and handed it to her. Across the front page was the calling for anyone with specialized knowledge. To help build a world for all magical life. Minerva glanced at it then back at him. "Are you sure? It's an awfully big job."

"…?" One questioning eyebrow went slanting upwards dangerously.

"I know they could use you. I'm asking if you think you're healed enough."

"I am ready. I sent a letter this morning." Well before telling anyone of his decision. He knew better then to give them the chance to cry and sniffle all day.

"If you're sure."

"Do I ever do anything any other way?" He asked. That drew a small smile.

"No." A pause. "I don't suppose I'll ever see you again then?"

"Aren't you lucky." Severus blinked and was nearly knocked over as his former coworker hugged him and kissed his cheek.

"Good luck. And enjoy it, it's quite an opportunity. Have you said anything to the others?"

"Only Flitwick."

"He'll miss you."

"Look after them." He didn't have to say who "them" was.

"Of course."

He was just glad she waited until he'd left before beginning to show any tears. He really didn't deal well with crying women. They made him feel guilty.

XX

_Greetings Xasseri, Siraka. _Rahkesh hissed softly as he entered the greenhouse where the Dyalnos tree, the elven blood tree, was growing. After a few months of Xasseri's constant presence Rahkesh had allowed him into the greenhouses. The elderly asp viper had smelled out the blood tree at once and asked about it. Upon having it explained Xasseri had settled in well and seemed to enjoy living at Rahkesh's small old house. It was certainly an easier life then he'd ever had and he had told Rahkesh several times that he liked the warmth of the greenhouses.

_Greetings. _Siraka hissed back at him, she was coiled on an empty patch of soil in the sun.

_Where is Xasseri?_ Rahkesh asked, looking around. Technically the two snakes didn't belong to him and they tended to come and go as they pleased, but so far they had always come back. They had also agreed on their own to not leave the wards on the property. There _were_ other parseltongues around, some of whom may or may not be willing to harm them to try to get information on Rahkesh. Rahkesh doubted that would happen, and truth potions did nothing to snakes, memory charms were fairly useless as well unless highly specialized. But both snakes seemed content and it was a good sized piece of land.

_Xasseri is right behind you_. Siraka hissed, laughing when Rahkesh turned around to find Xasseri right behind his feet. He had not noticed the serpent. Fortunately Sygra had; she was in Xasseri's face staring him down.

_I've still got it._ Xasseri hissed happily, _I may be old but I'm still sneaky! No harm intended._ He added gently to Sygra. The young basilisk was not amused. She of course had noticed him stalking them at once. _My apologies, you know I mean no harm._ Xasseri tried again. Sygra just blinked at him and then went over to greet Siraka properly in snake fashion - a gentle neck rub – ignoring Xasseri. Xasseri didn't seem particularly upset. The old snake knew perfectly well Sygra could kill him quite easily, but he didn't fear her and was highly unlikely to change his personality to suit her, he hadn't changed for Voldemort after all.

_Give it up Sygra. _Rahkesh hissed, _snakes are something that I should be watchful for, and you did just fine in detecting him. Good practice for you too hmm? _

_You do not need to worry about serpents. I am a serpent queen after all and it is my job to watch for any foolish snakes that might think about following or attacking you. _Sygra hissed back.

_A young queen needs practice too._ Rahkesh chided gently. Sygra was probably a decade or more away from maturity so he could call her young, though even she didn't know her real age.

_I practice constantly. I'm the one that planted the tickle bomb in Daray's bathtub._ Sygra reminded him. _He yowled like a stepped-on cat. _

_True._ Rahkesh agreed, giving up the argument. He was still waiting for revenge from that prank, but Daray hadn't yet figured out who had done it. Walking over to the bloodtree Rahkesh cast a measuring spell. Fed on his blood, which was very powerful in itself, plus growth potions, the young tree was flourishing. It was taller than Rahkesh, and more than thick enough to remove some wood for a wand without harming it too much.

Rahkesh opened the secret trap door in the floor of the greenhouse and levitated out the ceramic canisters that contained the blood he fed to his tree. He would need a lot to help it recover from the damage he was about to do. The three snakes took over one of the two chairs in the room while Rahkesh opened the canister and measured out an amount of blood equal to about twice the mass of his old wand.

Next Rahkesh cleared a worktable next to the circular stone container the bloodtree was in. It had its own half of the greenhouse in a stone container that dropped into the ground several meters and was close to three meters in diameter. On the empty worktable Rahkesh placed the blood he would need for the tree, the blood that would go in the wand, a sliver of basilisk fang and a small feather from the head of his thunderbird.

Sitting down on the edge of the massive stone container Rahkesh ran a finger gently over the brindled white and silver bark. He can considered using one of the blood red leaves, they held a luminescence that gave away their magical content, but this wand already had enough pieces. Finding a flat stretch of radiant white bark Rahkesh drew out a large oval with a crayon. He took a diagram of how a tree's interior was structured and levitated it beside him wandlessly. Placing his hand flat against the bark Rahkesh focused on the spell and kept his eyes fixed on the diagram, which he had altered for the unique tree according to a textbook on magical trees in the Akren library. If only it had included a warning about bloodtrees along with the diagrams.

_I love watching magic. It is so fascinating. _Xasseri hissed softly to Siraka.

_It is. Though it seems to cause a good deal of trouble to go with the benefits._

_Not when used properly._ Sygra said, watching carefully and sensing her link to Rahkesh for any sign of strain or unbalancing. He could feel her doing it, but he was too busy to complain. Which was good, he needed watching.

_I meant unintentional problems._ Siraka said.

_Well yes, there is that_. Sygra had to agree. Her own original transformation had not been much fun.

The bloodtree gave up the piece of wood he needed easily. Precisely the same length as his original wand, but pure white laced with silver. Rahkesh put it on the tale and began pouring his blood into the hole left behind. Closing it with a by magically thickening the blood at the top to seal it he left the tree and poured the leftover blood into the soil around its roots.

Making a wand involved placing some piece(s) of material inside a piece of wood, without breaking the wood in any way. The magical material had to meld completely with the wood without any of it being physically removed. The material took the place of the wood magically, and the leftover wood switched to the location the interior material had been at. It was, basically, switching two substances. In this case Rahkesh would need to place three substances inside while removing the wood that had been there. There was a spell for it, and the best wand makers could it wandlessly many times a day with little effort. Rahkesh had never made a wand, but he had practiced this part of spare pieces of wood in class. Those had all shattered.

Rahkesh placed the sliver of fang atop the feather, and then levitated both. Levitating some of his blood he coated both feather and fang sliver in it. Next came the tricky part; he had to keep the blood soaked feather and fang levitated so nothing dripped while performing the spell. Placing both hands over the piece of wood Rahkesh lowered the floating wand parts until they were just above the wood, and concentrated.

_That smells…a little painful. _Siraka commented, tongue flickering at the scent coming off Rahkesh.

_He's had a few magical injuries lately._ Sygra explained.

_Is he always injured_? Xasseri inquired, _he certainly seems to be._

_It is a frequent occurrence._ Sygra sighed. _He really can't look after himself. _

Painful or not the spell worked, perhaps because of the strong connection he had had with the tree the wood came from. When Rahkesh finally stopped he had a new wand and the leftover wood that had been removed to make space inside the wand. His scarred hand was throbbing agonizingly, but Rahkesh didn't care, it would probably always hurt some. He was also a bit dizzy, and sensed that the spell had only barely worked. He wasn't' terribly talented with plants to begin with, and he'd never done the spell successfully before. Perhaps being connected to the plant helped.

Picking up the wand he felt a rush of energy surge through him. His dizziness vanished instantly and was replaced with euphoria and his hand aching, but damn it felt good to have all that magic flowing again. Grinning Rahkesh glanced over at the snakes, and turned Sygra yellow. Laughing at her hiss of rage Rahkesh hurriedly began performing a few simple spells. The magic sparked easily as he silently cast harder and harder spells. It was easier then it had ever been with his old wand.

Finally Rahkesh turned Sygra back to her real coloring and cleaned up. Sygra hissed angrily at him and stuck her nose in the air when he picked her up.

_I can too take care of myself._ Rahkesh hissed at her. _Are you two staying?_ He asked the other snakes.

_If you'll allow it._ Xasseri replied for them both.

_Certainly. I need someone to keep the mice out._ Rahkesh replied.

_Consider them…eaten._ Xasseri hissed.

XX

Three days later Rahkesh was relaxing in the sun on top of a cliff overlooking the valley, practicing controlling the magic flowing from his new wand. He'd accidentally sent a feather through the ceiling of one of the school lounges while practicing, and had been asked by Tyler to perhaps continue his experimenting outside, where he was unlikely to damage anything.

From the darkening sky Daray swooped down in demon form, startling Sygra, who had been basking in the late evening sun beside Rahkesh, bad enough to make her spit venom at him. Daray shook it off his scales unharmed. Rahkesh, who was trying to recover from getting blasting by Namach's angry dark magic, quickly hissed at Sygra. He didn't want to deal with a fight.

"What was that for?" Daray asked. Sygra hissed and looked away, embarrassed.

"You startled her." Rahkesh said, folding his book closed. "You've been gone all day, everything all right?"

"Yes, family stuff." Daray said dryly, turning into his vampire form. "I've been helping clean out cellar space for extra battle equipment. It's been half a millennia since those spaces were cleaned. The cobwebs have been growing intelligences of their own. Never mind the piles of blood-filled wine bottles, half of them gone bad, or the odd skeleton grandmother forgot about."

"What fun." Rahkesh said, responding to Daray's tone of voice. Given the enchantments on the family fortress he'd probably been working without magic.

"You have no idea."

"So…regret being a vampire yet?" Rahkesh teased, and ducked when Daray swatted at him. Daray growled and Rahkesh smirked. Daray tried another tactic.

"Jealous aren't you?"

"Not for a minute."

"Thirty seconds is long enough." Daray cackled exultantly, the vampire's chimerical nature shifting to playful instantly. "You know you secretly want to be one of us. Ever imagined the taste of steamy blood and a fine red wine? Ah, a dream for the tongue! Or blood chocolate…" Daray trailed off with a heartfelt, but overly dramatic, sigh.

"No." Beside him Sygra made the snake version of a gagging noise.

_He should have been an actor_. Sygra opined, but Rahkesh wasn't quite sure that saying that in English wouldn't start a playful wrestling match that he didn't feel well enough for.

"And I just _know_ you envy the advanced sex drive." Daray purred flirtatiously, batting his eyelashes and leaning in against Rahkesh's shoulder. Rahkesh actually laughed.

"I got that cute little veela last summer, she didn't want _you._" Rahkesh knew Daray hated being reminded of that. "And before you start, no, do not I envy the whole nocturnal thing you've got going."

"Oooh, but being a creature of night is so much more _fun_." Daray purred at him.

"Yes, those early morning classes are delightful. Especially Ahmad's early morning combat classes." Rahkesh agreed. The vampires hated those classes. Ahmad said it was good for them. For everyone else it was the best chance to beat the crap out of the vampire students without getting too hurt.

"Even in the morning I'd still win." Daray said, "that's okay, I understand how inferior you feel."

"Want to back that up?" Rahkesh asked, curses flaring at his fingertips.

"Sorry. I'm in a hurry. The MLFC is meeting again tonight to sort through everyone who has submitted requests to be part of the world-building team."

"Funny. You didn't seem so hurried a moment ago. Are they actually meeting now?"

"Yes now. They just finished working through the applications and are ready to announce decisions."

"Are you going?" Rahkesh asked.

"Yes. You?"

"I suppose I will." Rahkesh said, he didn't really have a reason to be there but he tried to attend as many meetings as possible, that didn't conflict with his training, to be sure he was up to date.

"Are you okay?" Daray asked suddenly, smelling the air a little. "You're magic feels…odd. Like you've got some weird magic coming off you."

"Nothing." Rahkesh said, grimacing. That was probably the last of the dark magic Namach had blasted him with. After leaving the vampire with the headmistress Rahkesh had returned to his rooms, just in time for crippling pain to set in as every muscle group in his body cramped. He'd been on the floor for nearly an hour fighting down the pain while waiting for the magic to fade. Port-keying and apparating home had nearly made him faint and while creating a new wand had actually helped he was still hurting and was reading a book in the evening sun to try to relax a little. His snake-self appreciated the sun's warmth, but it was getting into fall and starting to get colder now. "Namach got pissed off and the air started reacting and I got hit with it."

"Ouch."

"Yes, just a little." Rahkesh said dryly. He wondered for a moment just what the hell Namach did to keep the vampire students in line. That dark magic that got loose when the ancient vampire was angry was bad, but not quite what a vampire would consider "proper" discipline. In the next second Rahkesh decided he really didn't want to know how Namach kept Akren's vampires in line.

"Daray what is going to happen to any vampires that go with the team? I mean they're stuck there alone after everyone else dies right? I know the time they're going to wasn't any time that had plentiful humans. Atlantis was gone and the magical populations hadn't recovered, few centaurs, few goblins, not that many fae either."

"It isn't a problem." Daray said.

"What? Are they just going to sit around through the ages to the present? If so then why didn't they get warnings out about the demons earlier? If they went back then they be here now wouldn't they? Unless Namach killed them off in his mass-murder thing."

"It isn't a problem Rahkesh, and that's all I'm saying. It has been taken care of." Daray said shortly. Rahkesh watched him for a moment then nodded. Okay fine, it wasn't really his business anyway.

"Theoretically if the team succeeds, then, we, right now, already have a viable world sitting out there don't we?"

"We won't know until the team leaves. Because if we haven't sent them then there can't be a new world can there?" Daray pointed out.

"True. Very confusing." Rahkesh sighed.

"The MLFC agrees with you. Grandmother says they're using large amounts of headache potions. You gave them the idea, but they have to actually make it work. It's so much easier to be the idea guy." Daray snickered. "Come on, we'd better get going."

"Silas?" Rahkesh asked, taking out his broom. He had taken to keeping it on its own tiny earring, for easy access. Having to take out the trunk, open it, get the broom, and close it again, was time consuming. This way required another tiny piercing, right next to the first, he hated the way it looked but being able to get at the broom quickly was just smart, and he hadn't come up with a better idea. Ally and Rianae both liked the extra obsidian chip, Rahkesh didn't.

"Silas has a few potions he and Tyler are working on." Daray said.

"I've been wondering" Rahkesh said as they headed out of the valley, "just how much of the history of the world is due to these people we're sending back in time."

"They're going too far back for any direct impact."

"Maybe, maybe not. There are a lot of gaps in human history, and lot of questions." Rahkesh said, Daray groaned.

"Start off thinking like that and you'll be needing headache potions too."

The MLFC main building was flooded with people going every which way. They weren't quite late, but only because this was an unexpected meeting and people were still arriving. Daray darted off quickly to chat for a moment with a young female vampire who he knew, she worked for a vampire-run potions shipping business that moved potions all over the world (a great many couldn't be transported magically). Rahkesh glanced at the schedule on the wall to find out who was meeting where.

Akren had several alumni joining the world-building team. Five were magical animal specialists and Rahkesh had been asked by a few of his comrades to at least look in on that meeting to see who had actually been chosen and who else not from Akren was going. Then he had a similar request on the people being sent back to work on magical plants.

He didn't mind being asked to get information for his fellow students. They'd just owe him a little. He didn't really know why they wanted to know that very night; everything would be announced in the papers soon enough. But Rahkesh didn't ask why his classmates wanted the team lists so quickly, and the Akren people working for the Canadian Ministry hadn't asked any questions when he'd arranged for his new identity through them. It wasn't like it was any trouble for him to find out. And he had already been keeping his fellow students up to date on everything the MLFC did, with help from Daray and Silas, including some stuff that hadn't been in the papers.

Daray had already said he was going to go observe the meeting on the selection of people for the nomagical animals team and the magical geologists. Rahkesh figured he'd meet him later, and so found the rooms he needed to get to and went off alone.

The MLFC main building was an immense old mansion that sprawled everywhere and had more wings than Rahkesh could count. He had left his map at Akren, and so managed to lose himself in the maze of corridors. Realizing he'd missed a hallway on the right that led to where he wanted to be Rahkesh turned around to head back. At that moment he very nearly tripped over a man turning the corner behind him.

"Sorry." Rahkesh said quickly, sidestepping.

"Wait."

Rahkesh turned and managed, just barely, not to let his jaw hit the floor when he came face to face with none other than Severus Snape.

"Yes?" He asked, keeping himself completely calm and just mildly curious. What on earth was Snape doing here? He was supposed to be working on the Hogwarts defenses. The school had become Britain's safe-house of sorts. Rahkesh had even sent his snake-friend Siraka with Moody to open the Chamber beneath the school. Why was Snape, of all people, walking around at the MLFC?

"Are you Rahkesh Asmodaeus?"

"Yes I am. And you are sir?"

"Severus Snape. I'm here to volunteer for the time travel team." Snape explained, seeming far more personable than Rahkesh had ever known him to be. To be fair though, he'd only ever known him when he (Rahkesh) had been a troublesome student. This was probably more like how Snape acted to his peers, when he felt like being polite.

"That's good of you." Rahkesh said, realizing he had to respond.

"We have a mutual acquaintance, the other basilisk used to be a student of mine. I used to be a Professor at Hogwarts." Snape went on. _Oh shit._ Rahkesh thought. This could get difficult. "I've been attempting to find him."

"I can't help you there. I have no idea where he lives. We've only ever spoken by owl." Rahkesh said, wondering why Snape hadn't just asked Moody, or Shacklebolt, or Tonks, or Remus.

"And when you teamed up to kill Voldemort."

"Yes, but then we met at the site." Rahkesh said agreeably, managing not to wince. Careful, he had to be careful talking to this man.

"I've tried sending owls to him; they come back with unopened letters. Since you seem to be the only person who contacts him, would you pass on a message for me?" Snape asked gently, pulling out a letter from the pocket of his robes and handing it across.

"Certainly." Rahkesh said, smiling and trying not to act relieved that this was all Snape had to say.

"Make sure he gets it some time soon will you? It's not terribly important, but I'd like him to have it." Snape asked. Rahkesh nodded, wondering what this was about. Snape sending him mail? Since when? Feeling a little light headed he wondered for a moment. Then, acting on impulse, Rahkesh concentrated very, very hard. On being a gentle wide-eyed innocent young man. He raised his voice a little, focused, and blinked. When his eyes opened again they were killing-curse green.

He started moving even as he spoke "I'll make sure he gets it soon Professor." Rahkesh said, smiling benignly, he quickly moved past Snape, turned the corner, and walked away. Out of sight he dropped his mask and let his eyes return to their usual color.

Behind him a very stunned Severus Snape stared at the wall for nearly a full minute, processing what he'd just seen.

When he walked into the meeting hall for the potions masters five minutes later he was still smiling.

Finding a seat in the back row in the meeting hall for those who worked with magical creatures Rahkesh wondered just why he'd done that. What had possessed him to let Snape, of all people, know his double identity. Sure Moody knew, Remus certainly knew, Tonks, Shacklebolt, but why had he even given Snape a clue?

Finally Rahkesh settled on the only answer that made any sense; Snape was going back in time, he would die there, and he'd take Rahkesh's secret to the grave, and in the mean time it would probably give him something to laugh about. The boy wonder turned into Akren's killer thunderbird. Would the Order of the Phoenix shit themselves about that! It still didn't explain anything, and so Rahkesh told himself again not to act on impulse. Except his instincts usually served him very well. Shaking his head Rahkesh put the incident behind him and focused on the centaur that was getting up onto the platform at the front of the room. The first centaur Rahkesh didn't know, but a moment later Vaire entered the room, shiny flowing gold making him look a little like a floating cloud puff, though he'd kill Rahkesh for thinking it. Vaire cleared his throat loudly to get everyone's attention.

"Before we start I have an announcement for the MLFC. It is an announcement my colleagues are currently making in every other meeting hall. We, the centaurs, have a way to send our team back fourteen thousand years. It will work only once, and we are willing to donate it to the cause."

XX

"Let me make sure I heard that right. The centaurs have a way to send everyone back fourteen thousand years. Alive and happy like. And they invented this method because there was once a centaur who wanted to rule the world? And she gathered a massive army of centaurs and was going to take them back to the last truly major human/centaur war? To win it and take over the world? And the only reason it didn't work is because some little baby centaur didn't listen to its mother and stuck its head through the portal and accidentally killed everyone involved? The centaurs wanted to dominate the WORLD? Have I heard this right?" Rianae asked incredulously.

The students standing around their table in the dining hall were staring with open mouths, disbelief written on every face. Most of the Akren student population was there at the moment, eating dinner after the evening classes had finished and before any night classes started. Most of them were also listening intently to Rahkesh right then, trying to believe their ears.

Grinning ear to ear Rahkesh nodded. He'd needed it repeated too the first time he'd heard it. Centaurs wanting to rule the world? It seemed so far beyond belief that when Vaire had gotten up to explain how the centaurs happened to come by a device that did exactly what they needed Rahkesh had been sure he was dreaming and just hadn't woken up yet. But no, there really had been a centaur with dreams of world domination and she'd gotten herself a massive army and invented a time travel device that, while she'd only been going back about two thousand years, could do just about anything if given enough power.

"That's awesome. It failed because some infant didn't listen to its mother?" Ally asked.

"Yep."

"And the centaurs, the _centaurs_, the I-see-things-in-the-stars _centaurs_ were planning to take over Earth?" A werewolf asked.

"Yep." But he ought to clarify, "just Asia."

"Oh okay, nothing big or anything." Justin laughed, Justin was an Okata fae, and they were from Japan.

Since he had access to the Conclave at any time and wasn't a vampire he was basically serving as the student's ear inside the Conclave. It meant a lot of time listening to tedious discussions, but Rahkesh benefited by being so useful to his peers. Anyone who wanted to know what was going on in a specific area (especially the older students who would be looking for influential jobs soon) came to Rahkesh for information. And those who had friends or relatives who might be useful and wanted certain questions answered gave them to Rahkesh. And so Rahkesh was becoming quite popular around Akren, without having to kill anyone to get there. And people actually respected him, without attacking him first. Rahkesh thought it was a pretty good deal.

"Centaurs…_centaurs?_ Dude that's nuts." Matolo said, starting to laugh. "You don't suppose Venus told them to do it or anything?"

"No one asked. We were all too busy trying to wrap our minds around the concept. I think the centaurs are offended that this idea confused us any."

"So how soon-" Tyler stopped short as magic crackled through the air. In an instant everyone was on their feet, looking around.

AAAARRRGGGHHH

The doors of the dining hall were torn off their hinges as several massive beasts lunged inside. Rahkesh had time enough only to notice that they looked like demons before curses were flying everywhere. Ducking out of the crowd he found a counter and leaped up onto it.

Over the heads of the throng of students, now actively fighting the demons, Rahkesh realized that these were not actually demons. Or rather they were, but they were _dead._ They were being attacked by the dead bodies Akren had stored in the laboratories. Dead flesh hanging off half-exposed skeletons, eye-less skulls and shriveled organs trailing behind them.

One of the beasts spotted him and lunged, its rotted wings couldn't get it off the ground but it kicked two werewolves out of the way, its long claws tearing into their backs. Rahkesh jumped down off the counter, enlarged his staff and wrapped magic around it and sent flames shooting down it to engulf the charging corpse.

The fire did nothing but burn off the last of the flesh. When the flames cleared a full demon skeleton shook itself, flapped its bone wings, and lunged for the nearest student. Green liquid splashed across one bone wing, melting the bones off. The student ducked and rolled, bringing up a broadsword to defend himself. The sword glanced off the bones harmlessly. A second strike cracked a rib but the skeleton didn't seem to notice.

Rahkesh dodged to avoid bits of flying bone as someone blew up another of their attackers. Each bone fragment that hit the ground began twitching, and then grew. Rahkesh watched as a thousand bone shards turned into a thousand full grown bone demons all around them. Another demon shattered, and each fragment became a new bone demon. Claws raking into the floor the new demons surged at the students with reckless disregard for their own safety. Mindless, souless, reanimated killing machines.

"Melt them!" Ally called out over the fight, "they stay dead that way! Don't take them apart, you have to melt them!"

The students changing tactics and began melting. Diving under a leaping demon Rahkesh liquefied the jaws of another just as they were about to close on his head. Ducking the dripping bone matter Rahkesh melted the rest of it. Around him demons were going down fast. Without their formidable scaled hide their skeletons were very strong, but not impervious to magic. And they didn't have working minds and so could not adapt.

Rahkesh dodged an attacking demon, and conjured acids. Beside him Ally was weaving wandless magic into an intricate four-color globe. Hurling it she put it right into the skull of a charging demon, melting the entire beast on contact. Rahkesh knocked them both to the ground to avoid a leaping skeleton and sent fire after it, charring the skeleton and removing a leg. It didn't regrow.

The fight spread across the dining hall with students melting, and burning demon skeletons any way they knew how. The air began to reek of burned bone and acid. Blood flew through the air and a moment later a student with wings dove into the fight to drag out the wounded person before the demons could finish him off. Behind him Rahkesh heard chanting, followed by a wave of energy as a demon combusted and burned to ash.

Drawing his new wand Rahkesh conjured fire and superheated it before sending it at three demons. The three started burning and tried to run. Other students added their own fire spells. Rahkesh drew a flame potion from a pocket and tossed the contents onto another demon before throwing fire at it too. The potion burned hot enough to melt rock and the demon was only bone.

Deprived of most of their magic, fire, venom, and shield-like scaled skin the skeletons were being melted and burned through. Rahkesh cast melting spells on several and increased the magic he was using until he found the level needed to melt their bones down. Fending off another skeleton with hard cracks of his staff and fireballs Rahkesh melted several into sloppy bone-goo puddles. Around him the other students were getting creative, now that they were in little real danger. The last demon went down under one of Rianae's threadmagic pieces that turned it into a pile of ash.

In the silence following the fight students began casting healing spells and cleaning demon remains off their weapons or clothes. Several of those studying to be doctors began gathering the worst injured, most of who had been right next to the doors when the demons attacked.

Eyeing a pile of melted bone Rahkesh wondered just what that stuff could be used for, and whether or not it was still a threat. More important, really, was how the demons had reanimated so many of their dead. Summoning all the demon remains into one pile Rahkesh conjured a tarp under it and carefully wrapped up the mess.

"Well the floor show wasn't quite what I'm accustomed too, but not too bad considering. Do you think the professors did this to test us?" Daray asked, appearing beside Rahkesh.

"I doubt it. We've got days left, hurting someone irreparably now would be counter productive."

"Excellent assessment." Their headmistress said, appearing just behind them, startling both badly. "Everyone listen up! All of the injured go straight to the healer's wing. The rest of you straighten up this hall and get some rest. No classes tonight." Alefly called out, her voice magics allowing everyone to hear her without her having to raise her voice much.

"The remains?" Daray asked.

"Most of our alumni are settled in the mountain fortresses. They'll be doing the examinations to determine what happened." Alefly said, taking the tarp-wrapped pile from Rahkesh. "We have plenty of other secure laboratories around under the mountains. Fix this place up and get some rest, all of you."

"Everyone's here already?" Daray asked. "That was fast."

"No sense in waiting. Anyone dead?" Alefly asked.

"I don't think so." Rahkesh said, the blood volume on the floor wasn't nearly that much. "Are there anymore?"

The Headmistress jerked her head towards the hallway as she went over to a student who appeared to have a broken hip. Rahkesh followed Daray to the main doors and looked out into the hallway.

The floor was almost invisible beneath melted demon remains. There must have been thousands, many thousands. The goop was so deep Rahkesh couldn't see the floor…someone had probably shattered a few before realizing they'd just regrow into that many more. The melted bone was dripping off the ceiling in huge globs and splats and running down the walls to add to the lumps and oozing mess on the floor.

In the middle of the slop were Professors Marluck, Marluck, Strawlime, Coro, Vaeryes, Yetran, and Stiali. Plus about thirty students, who were watching bemusedly while their professors argued over what to do with the remains, with much hand waving to punctuate their points. The fact that they were almost ankle deep in demon skeletal mush had apparently escaped anyone's notice.

"Grandmother did always encourage us to play in dirty substances as children; she thought it was good for us. I don't think this is what she had in mind." Silas said, charming the floor to stop the spread of the hot gooey remains. Professor Strawlime began conjuring containers and levitating the mess into them.

"I suppose he'll have fun figuring this stuff out." Tyler commented. "I'm sure there's all sorts of nasty demon-melting research to be done." Everyone chuckled. Their serial killer psycho sadist professor had been in hog heaven since the war began.

"I do love dinners at Akren." Ally sighed, sitting down again and canceling the shield she'd had over her dinner plate. Now that was a good idea, Rahkesh thought ruefully, looking at the cursed mess of his own. Oh well, he'd been about done anyway. Around them students were cleaning everything and either getting a second meal from the evening buffet or giving up and heading off to their rooms.

"So when will the centaurs have their time-travel device ready?" Mara asked Rahkesh.

"Day after tomorrow I think." Rahkesh replied. "Can't be too soon really. We need to be able to access that world to prepare, and we can't do that until we send the team back."

"I'm sure there will be some sort of elaborate ceremony." Silas said.

"Of course. And of course that will probably be more of nervous experience for our team then going back in time will be." Ally said, "it would be for me. But every head of government will want to shake everyone's hand."

"Such a jaded cynic," Rianae said, "they just want the team to know everyone wishes them well…and get a photo in." Everyone chuckled.

It was amazing, Rahkesh thought, how fast everyone at Akren could go into full attack and then back to light bantering over dinner in just a few minutes. It was a very useful trained ability, but a little odd. No one had died, he was sure of that, and no one had been too horribly injured. And with everything cleaned up there was no reason not to go back to what they had been doing. But he was fairly sure that any other group of people would have been more affected by being attacked in the middle of dinner. But, perhaps, Akren students were just practical and efficient.

Late that night Rahkesh, Daray, Rianae, Ally, Silas, Haedil, Justin, and Tyler were relaxing in Rianae's rooms. Wooden model demons sat atop a battered scratched and burned old coffee table that Rianae kept for practicing on. The little wooden models were covered with a piece of cloth that professor Stiali swore would mimic demon hide. Given that he was a Master Threadmage and had personally woven and tested this fabric, is was probably a pretty good replicate.

They were taking turns attempting spells that impacted the demon's insides without bothering about breaking the hide. Some spells could destroy specific organs and could flow right through the hide. So far there were very few that worked well. The demon hide apparently blocked the flow of magic across it very effectively. Summoning, however, did work. And so the war might well be fought by summoning the demon's internal organs. Until they figured out the energy they needed to block that too. According to Sharahak a demon could fill their scales with magic designed to deflect specific things. If the demon knew what was coming it could alter the magic in it scales to shield it against that specific spell.

Rahkesh felt a wave of deep powerful magic swirl around him, immediately stilling all possible movement and demanding complete attention. The power behind it made his breath leave him as the sparkling energy settled just outside of his mind, feeling like cool mountain air. But it was also a dark and dangerous energy. It made the hairs on his neck stand up, but this was a familiar presence. Daray also paused as he sensed it and watched Rahkesh. Rahkesh closed his eyes and carefully let down his mental shield just a little, the pulse of thought made his brain ache a bit, even when Namach was being careful.

"What is it?" Daray asked curiously.

"Necromancer's Guild needs my help…well they need a thunderbird…some sort of mass demon killing thing." Rahkesh said. He stood up so he wouldn't be knocked over and reached up to his neck and caught Sygra before letting Namach know he was ready. A second later he felt Namach's magic take hold.

Rahkesh froze as soon as he realized he'd been transported. Looking around he found himself in a large cream colored conference room with about forty or so beings of a few species. Most of them were vampires but there was a good smattering of werewolves, humans, a few fae, and two centaurs.

And they were all looking at him with far too much interest.

"My apologies for the rush." Tristan Namach spoke softly from the head of the large diamond shaped table. He didn't sound particularly sorry. The ancient was dressed in silver, black and white and looking like royalty. It was not terribly surprising the vampires tended to call him their king behind his back.

The necromancers were arranged down both sides of the table, White to Namach's right, Black to his left. To each side of him was a Gray, with the head of the Orders after them. There weren't very many necromancers, and this was probably most of them. There were eight empty seats near the end of the table. Rahkesh chose the one next to the last of the Black. He hoped the Whites weren't insulted, he just happened to be teleported onto that side of the room. Though he was definitely going to wind up a Black he didn't need to declare that to anyone. The Whites might get annoyed.

"Not a problem. I had just finished fighting off an army of reanimated demon skeletons and was looking for something to do with my evening." Rahkesh finally replied, guessing that such a reply would get a good response on several levels.

There was no surprise or shock from anyone. Had they all known about the demon attack already? It had been four hours, so they probably did. There was a range of amused expression at his cheek, which was good. He'd been using a politely amused tone of voice. Apparently necromancers had a sense of humor like his. Now why did that not surprise?

"I trust no one died." Namach said without the slightest surprise.

"No."

"Excellent. I had to put down a similar attack at my favorite laboratory earlier this evening; else we would be meeting there." Namach said. He gestured to the table where Rahkesh saw two tiny, shrunken, but very alive and angry, demon skeletons. They were biting at the blue blowing magic box they were in.

"Cute." Rahkesh said. It seemed to come out on its own, but it got more grins.

"I suspect they will be useful. They are not being controlled from the demon realm. The demons got a signal through to activate them, but that is all. They must have been enchanted while the demons were still alive, before being sent into this world." Namach teleported away the demons and their box with a flick of his fingertips. "But that is not why I called you away."

"You mentioned some diabolical plot." Rahkesh agreed.

"I'll explain it simply; we're making a giant death cloud, in the demon realm." Namach said. "Most of the necromancers will be involved in the initial creation. It'll take all of us to build up something this massive and keep it controlled while we bind it. Death clouds, being clouds, tend to disperse. We want to alter this one to drain death magic and stay condensed enough to last for hours. Normally this would involve the creators being present to control it, but that can't happen this time. Nor can we use the other traditionally method of long-distance control via mind magic and willpower, the portals into the demon realm are too disruptive."

"Go on," Rahkesh said. He had looked up death cloud magic after accidentally creating one while training with Silas and Nuri. He noted that apparently he would be working with basically every necromancer alive. Meaning that they would all get a fairly good view of his capabilities. And with all of them, working together…this was going to be one massive death cloud. Had there ever been a time when all the necromancers had joined on one project? Not that he had heard about. Any one necromancer was formidable, but all of them? This war might be over before it started.

"Electricity and magic interact a little. Therefore a strong electrical current, modified for death, can probably keep the cloud connected for far longer then it would stay so on its own." Namach explained. Rahkesh had been listening carefully and was starting to catch on.

"And so you need a thunderbird. You want to me to send electricity through death, whip it back here, and create…it'd have to be a spider-web like design, to reach all parts…and with a loose center to keep everything even." Rahkesh said, thinking it out. He got a few approving nods.

"Electricity alone isn't enough, so while the foundation will be built that way we'll wrap it in raw magic, and let the electrical flows guide that." Namach said.

"Sending electricity through death often means _being_ there."

"You already have a permanent connection. I know your soul isn't entirely healed yet, to avoid overwhelming you I'll direct the energy from the other side." Namach said.

From the other side? But that meant he could send his own magic into death and still have full control over what it was doing over there. Rahkesh managed not to shiver. He could only force magic over and back again, he didn't know what was happening to it over on the other side. Namach was implying that he had full control in either life or death, and both at the same time. He was also saying that raw magic could be directed from multiple people, into death, and into a directed pattern of his creation. Well, there was a reason why no one messed with the necromancers. They didn't like working together, but when they did they did so very well indeed.

"The center?" Rahkesh asked.

"We'll be building death magic cords around your lightning, and then I will weave them into a base after a threadmagic pattern." Namach explained. "Really all you have to do is drive your thunderbird form as far as it can go."

"If you say so." Rahkesh said dubiously, wondering if maybe he could do threadmagic that way one day. It sounded ridiculously difficult. The kind of thing only utilized for big projects….that involved killing. Probably not the solution to his threadmagic issues.

"While we carry out this attack, Cyala is arranging her own." Namach informed everyone. Rahkesh assumed that the necromancers had not been informed of this part, given that they all turned to look intently at Namach. "She's got a few demon skeletons and when they animated and attacked earlier today she captured them all. She's broken them up repeatedly and has several thousand right now. Several of her clan know runic magic, and they've carved runes into the skeletons of every demon. She's sending them back into the demon realm, coated in chemical explosives that will go off when heated to anything above zero Celsius. The runes are to ensure that when they blow up they keep on attacking. Additionally the runes will expand the acidic gas cloud the chemicals will develop into. I doubt the demon army wears gas masks." Namach said with a feral grin.

"Diabolical. I only wish there was video." Rahkesh said.

"I'm sure we'll be able to get a few memories of the survivors once they get into our world." The Commander of the White Order assured him. He was a human, bald, very old, but with sharp eyes, strong features, and one of the evilest grins Rahkesh had ever seen. There was also something about him that unnerved the both the thunderbird and serpent. That man, Rahkesh thought, was the leader of the White Order for a reason. Rahkesh recalled that the White Order was headed by Nicholas Walcressen, who was supposedly even more cold-hearted than Voldemort had ever been, and Rahkesh decided to stay away from him. He didn't like the way he was being eyed, like Walcressen really, really, wanted Rahkesh to join the White Order, and was assessing his potential. This was a man whose profession involved killing innocent people and animals as sacrifices to pull death magic out of their suffering. Namach might have invented the art, but he at least was balanced by also inventing the Black, and he favored the later. Walcressen was just creepy in a vile way.

"When do we start?" Rahkesh asked. What else was there to say?

XXX

_It's not that I don't trust you; it's that I do not want to kill you._ Rahkesh assured his familiar.

_I am in no danger from you. _

_No, probably not, but what about all the other death magic around? What if when all that death magic is flying around I can't sense you and electrocute you accidentally?_

_And what if one of those vampire necromancers gets a little too interested in the power of your blood?_

_No good Sygra, I can handle them just fine. Besides, I doubt anyone is crazy enough to try anything during a ritual like this with every necromancer alive in attendance. _

_Okay, what about the magics that I could learn by watching. _

_Sygra...this is not snake-magic. _Rahkesh sighed. She was being stubborn about coming with him for this crazy death cloud thing. _You're not coming._ He said quickly when she was about to start again. Sygra hissed and turned around to coil up on his pillow, head under her coils. Wonderful, now she was sulking. Rahkesh took out his earrings and left them behind in a box. The magic that contained his shrunken trunks might get damaged during this, so it was better to not bring them.

He figured this would probably be fairly safe. It wouldn't look good at all if he died helping the necromancers. And given that they probably all knew he wanted to become a necromancer, and as such would be a fairly high-profile supporter of their magic, having him alive and friendly was in their best interests. Besides, he was…unique…and studying his strange connection with electricity might be useful to them.

Which did not mean he hadn't noticed the very obvious danger involved, he had, he just thought that killing a few thousand demons was worth it. As far as Rahkesh could tell the only potential problem was the one posed by either the vampires or werewolves present. Either species might think to benefit from making him one of them. The werewolves were unlikely to do so because if he was turned without his consent he'd probably join a different pack in order to retaliate. Therefore they were unlikely to go after him. The vampires were another matter. Vampires had a great deal of power over new vampires they created, and Rahkesh was sure there were a few out there who thought he might make a good addition to their ranks. Fortunately for him Most of them were unlikely to risk the sort of damage they'd probably receive during the fight, not with the demons so close. And, of course, attacking him would probably piss off Namach rather thoroughly.

Rahkesh sat on a bench in the hallway outside the chamber where the portal was being kept, waiting. The necromancers were all inside building the death cloud. Around him six apprentices were sitting on benches or leaning against the walls. Given the nature of the magic being used anyone not involved could be a liability if they were too close. The apprentices were eyeing him curiously, but trying not to be obvious about it. Most of them looked completely nonchalant and at ease. Rahkesh didn't believe it for a minute.

Rahkesh hadn't seen the sacrifices that the White Order was using, but he had been told by one of the apprentices, a cold young woman from South Africa, that they were vampires who had been created illegally and caused some sort of massive battle. The White order was also utilizing an equal number of dementors, and muggles. The young woman claimed the muggles were all criminals, but when Rahkesh had asked who had convicted them she had just sneered at him.

A black door in one wall opened and a short black robed apprentice came out. He was nearly ready to take the necromancer trials and so had been watching from a one-way window. The others all looked up with varying degrees of nervousness and eagerness. Rahkesh, swimming in a mass of thunderbird magic, felt nothing but an almost uncontrollable urge to transform. He was so close to the edge that he was nearly transforming. The others had sensed something and had all been staying well away. The black robed apprentice eyed him cautiously for a moment before speaking.

"They're ready for you."

Rahkesh nodded and got up, the main entrance to the chamber was a gold door. As he went through the apprentices split, white and black, and headed into their own viewing chambers.

Inside Rahkesh realized at once that the room was not a chamber. One half of the room was a cave, the other half opened out into empty air so far up a cliff that he could see nothing but sky. The edge of the cliff was right through the center of the room. The half that was solid chamber was patterned in black and white swirling marble. But it wasn't marble, Rahkesh could feel magic in it, and this was not marble, though he had no idea what it was.

The half that was a cave was immense, nearly the size of the Hogwarts quidditch pitch. Hovering just above everyone's heads was a solid black mass. It was so thick it looked solid, and was being held down by the upraised hands of the necromancers. Rahkesh guessed it had been vastly condensed so as to be easier to maneuver. Rahkesh looked around and found Namach approaching him.

"Just jump off the ledge and transform. We're right atop the mountain, on top of a spire. It's a two thousand five hundred meter drop all around, straight down. Don't worry about damaging anything, this place is fairly impervious. We'll release the cloud once you're ready."

Walking to the cliff edge Rahkesh didn't bother looking down; he just dove into the air. Enjoying the freefall he felt the thunderbird surge and transformed.

The euphoria that came with being a power-crazed magic-filled electric bird always made him feel like his heart might stop. Then the magic overtook everything and he let go, loosing lightning in every direction and charging the atmosphere. The air started to roll and glow as Rahkesh went into the thunderbird's non-solid form.

The watching necromancers stared with open mouths as the thunderbird expanded to cover the entire sky and thick clouds formed. Despite the clear day the charged air was drawing everything into the cloudy mass around the thunderbird. The roar and rumble grew to a deafening dim. Individual lightning bolts splintered across the sky with cracks so loud the shock waves hurt.

The massive bird flew upwards, still growing. The clouds grew with it, drawing in all available moisture and wrapping in upon themselves. Rahkesh flapped his wings and began deliberately increasing the power he was giving off, and the whole mountain began to shake. The lighting came in rolling waves that crashed and shattered off the domed necromancers hall and tore into the mountainside.

"On three, let it go and force it around the storm." Namach called out. "One, two, three!"

The necromancers hurled the death cloud out and expanded it. Released it billowed outwards. Each controlling their own piece the necromancers pulled it up and around until it completely wrapped around the thunderbird. Releasing it they all stepped back while Namach and his Grays began the next step.

Feeling the death cloud close in around him made him claustrophobic, and Rahkesh began battling with it, pouring electrical energy into it. Reigning in his instincts Rahkesh continued to charge the air and wrapped himself in layers of lightning bolts that rippled into an expanding web of electrical currents. The web of linked lightning bolts became continuous flowing snapping electrical currents that lashed in loops and spirals through the air.

_Perfect. Center the web on yourself. I'm holding the death cloud off of you but you'll have to become corporeal for the next part._ Namach warned him.

The thunderbird screamed and Rahkesh lost control as the thunderbird's defiant nature asserted itself violently and refused the idea of solidifying. That was limiting. He hated limits. His rage fed the storm and the necromancers had to block their eyes and charm their ears against the light and the sound that came screaming out of their death cloud. Furious Rahkesh poured his anger into a mass of defiant energy.

_This is not the time for that._ Namach snapped through his mind. Rahkesh threw the vampire out and sent lightning roaring after the mind-presence. Letting out a cry loud enough to make one of the apprentices faint Rahkesh began pulling in the center of his still expanding web, knotting it tighter around himself. Screaming and raging he sent lightning flying out of the death cloud.

Then the death cloud began swallowing his energy. Lightning bolts looped into death, and then came back out at an accelerating speed. Namach had control of the death cloud and as he pulled the lightning-web through it he rebuilt it. The web flowed through death and reappeared in two parts. One web was all lashing flailing lightning in an uncontrolled rolling mass of loose ends and stray snapping bolts originating from a tight snarled knot, the other was a perfectly ordered spider-web-like mass of electrical flows that crackled, hissing and sparked. The controlled web folded and spun and danced through the air so fast it all blurred into a haze that made the air sing. As web spun, grew and accelerated more tiny links sprouted everywhere and vibrated as the web wrapped itself into an indecipherable mass of electrical energy. Inside it danced the crazed flailing tentacles of the other web.

_You need to get back to solid form._

Rahkesh refused, ferociously roaring and screaming his defiance. Completely lost in the thunderbird he didn't care about what he was supposed to be doing, he just wanted to rage and energize and destroy.

_Rahkesh NOW_

Namach's roar crashed through Rahkesh's mind. He closed himself off, burned away the connection, and ignored it. He felt Namach try again and sent raging thunderbolts at his mind. Annoyed the vampire dropped away and tried just speaking.

"Rahkesh we're about to send it through. You've got to become solid to get out of there!"

The air exploded into a frenzy of fresh lightning so bright it blocked out the darkness of the death cloud. Namach pulled the new wave through as quickly as he could and added it to the webs. The two webs expanded, pushing the death cloud outward with them. Inside the death cloud was so dense the electrical webs were totally obscured, but on the outer edges Namach wrapped the lightning around the cloud to contain it. The fast-raising magical levels Rahkesh was giving off expanded the whole structure until it began to consume the domed building atop the spire. The necromancers fell back behind the enchanted doors and watched from the windows.

"Damn it Rahkesh NOW!"

Rahkesh ignored the order, shrieking his defiance and feeding his storm, his flight path began to spiral around the mountain top, blasting into the spire.

Standing alone at the cliff edge Namach glared up at his student, and realized that Rahkesh had gone so far into the thunderbird that he could not get himself out. This was the same insane raging beast that had almost consumed Rahkesh when he had first transformed. And it was pulling on its fury and power to block out any effect the basilisk had. Not for the first time the vampire fervently wished Rahkesh would complete his transformation soon, he would have much better control then…probably. But he had not completed his transformation, and was not going to become corporeal on his own.

Namach glanced down over the cliff edge to the wide ledge where the golden portal was glowing. It was down below so that they could funnel the death cloud into it easily. They had opened it in stages and the final one was just releasing.

He had maybe a minute and a half until it opened fully. And at that time they needed to have the cloud going through, lest demons start trying to get through into their world.

Out of options the vampire jumped off the cliff and transformed. The massive white ice dragon shot into the death cloud and circled up above Rahkesh. Unharmed by the vicious lightning bolts or the death cloud he spun up above Rahkesh and adjusted his size until he matched the thunderbird. Folding his wings Namach dropped until his claws were just above Rahkesh's not-quite-solid back. Then he leaned in and collapsed across Rahkesh.

Focusing on matching Rahkesh amorphous nature Namach bit deep into the back of Rahkesh's neck. He dug his claws into his back and aligned his wings just above Rahkesh.

Namach's bite hit him through the back of the neck and shot inwards like a red-hot spear. Rahkesh screamed and fought but the dragon was latched onto his back. Namach's magic forced his wings to solidify and the vampire drove his wing claws into Rahkesh's wings. Blood splattered everywhere as Rahkesh fought, Namach let go, realigned his teeth, and bit down again. Getting a firm hold and growling Namach gave him a hard shake by the back of the neck and sent a wave of magic into Rahkesh through his bite.

_Solid form NOW!_ Namach barked into his mind through the bloody wound where his fangs were holding Rahkesh's neck.

Completely on autopilot Rahkesh responded vampire's voice magic without being able to think about it, Namach's magic overriding the thunderbird's instincts in the form of direct magical order. Rahkesh jumped back into fully solid form with a crashing wave of lightning that dislodged the vampire and electrocuted his fangs, claws, and underbelly. The dragon leaped back with a roar of pain.

_Drop out of the cloud_. Namach barked out quickly as he opened the death cloud a little. The death cloud had begun to spin around itself like a spiraling galaxy and the dragon nearly flipped in the mix of dead and living air masses. He folded his wings and plummeted down after Rahkesh, hitting him hard enough that Rahkesh lost control and went into a tumbling free fall.

The Gray necromancers caught the cloud, drew it in and began turning it into a tornado-like form. They redirected the funnel towards the portal, but even without them it was already falling down fast, pulled by the demonic energy. Quickly they began to lose control of the rate of descent and the funnel went crashing down the spire.

Spinning and falling the thunderbird and ice dragon plummeted out of the cloud. Orienting himself Namach brought himself upright but didn't stop his fall. With the death cloud spinning around just above them, and rapidly following them down toward the portal, he needed to get them both out of the way.

The ice dragon slammed into the thunderbird's back and drove him downward faster by magically accelerating them and increasing his weight. Rahkesh whipped his wings around, trying to orient himself. The lashing waves of air from the death clouds were spinning him completely out of control.

The death cloud was now spinning uncontrollably fast down towards the glowing portal. It was large enough that the funnel wrapped around the entire spire. The ends of the trailing, flailing webs were covered in death magic and giving off enough violent stray bits of magic that Rahkesh and Namach couldn't fly out.

They had to get below the ledge where the portal waited. The death cloud wouldn't kill either of them but even Namach would be seriously harmed by the concentrated death magic. It was designed for demons and would merely seriously burn either of them, and possibly rip apart their bloodmagic.

The death cloud screeched through the air, the noise turning into a roar as the funnel of magic dropped into the portal. Just below it the vampire pushed himself and the thunderbird downward faster, knowing he had to get below the ledge before the last of the funnel hit them.

They shot passed the ledge with the portal in a blur. Unable to stop the two plummeted towards where the spire ended and the mountain began to widen.

Rahkesh hit first, crashing into the mountainside with an impact that snapped his ribs and wing bones. The dragon landed on him, its wings forcing his broken ones into the rock and its jaw hitting him over the head hard enough to make his vision go black for a moment. The ice dragon's legs slammed down on either side of his body, its claws meters deep into the solid rock, holding them both in place so they wouldn't slide down the steep slope. With a thunderous crash Namach slammed his tail down below them and rammed the spikes into the rock. Rahkesh's talons had caught the rock deep and he managed not to collapse as his shattered ribs crushed into his chest and his wings burned in pain.

Keeping Rahkesh firmly pinned down Namach twisted his neck up and looked up at the ledge.

The portal opened and the Grays sent the death magic tornado flying through. The mass was so large it took several minutes as it all peeled off the spire and sought out the portal and spun into it.

Then it was done. The sky was clear, the air breathable. And the portal had melted into a useless heap of poisonous gold.

The necromancers hurried out to the edge of the cliff and looked down.

On the mountainside Namach realized Rahkesh had passed out. His collapsed ribcage and broken wings had knocked him unconscious, probably from pain and shock. This was problem, since he was not returning to human form. The mountainside, supporting both their weight, began to crack. Finding the open bleeding wounds on Rahkesh's neck Namach bit him again and forced his body back to being human.

The human crumpled off the shattered electrocuted rocks in a broken heap. Namach caught him in two claws and pushed off the mountainside. Flying back up to the cliff he dropped down onto it and transformed, sinking down the last twenty-meters while levitating Rahkesh's body.

"Is he alive?" The Commander of the Blacks, Lord Asano, Master of Tokyo, asked.

"Collapsed rib cage." Namach said with a sigh.

"What happened?"

"Thunderbird's aren't known for self control. That's why he needs a basilisk, to balance it out. Unfortunately the thunderbird is still the dominant form." Namach explained. "I trust you can handle the cleanup?"

"Of course." Asano replied easily. "The portal?"

"One of the public Akren-operated laboratories I think. That way it will be secure and everyone can study it."

"As you wish." Asano murmured. Telepathically he sent another message _are you sure that this one would make a good apprentice?_

_Yes. Wasn't that obvious? _Namach asked as he began healing Rahkesh ribs. Asano had been one of his first apprentices, and at two thousand was an ancient in his own right.

_He's a bit…wild. _

_And how would you describe Konovalov? Marcus? Leshaeva? Anandi? Or yourself?_

_True…none of us were thunderbirds with serious temperament issues. _

_If you had his temperament you would be a thunderbird. It's a soul animagus. _

_So his SOUL is what's so defiant? Does he even have the capacity to do what he's told? _

_Yes, when human. _

_Have fun with this one. I do not envy you in the least. If Konovalov was infuriating this one will drive you insane. _Asano said, seriously thinking that the young human would probably drive Tristan to kill him.

_How fortunate I have never made a claim on sanity. He's quite obedient when the instructions make sense and he's very polite, when human. _

_Hmm…the basilisk. And I suppose thunderbird's are not problematic as long as they want to do what you're asking. _

_Actually his thunderbird form is not a problem unless he lets go and completely immerses himself in that side of his being. _Tristan said.

_Has he agreed to be you next apprentice?_

_I haven't asked. He's eighteen._

_Oh. May I suggest hurrying up a bit? Goodness knows there were enough vampires salivating at the scent of him before this. And this little demonstration will not be kept silent. Were you to order it the Whites would ignore you. They know you need them for the war and cannot afford to kill them._ Asano added the last quickly, knowing that Tristan regarded extermination as a perfectly acceptable control method. Tristan finished with Rahkesh's ribs and ran a scanning spell to see what else was broken. The necromancers moved around them, cleaning up the remains of the sacrifices, eyeing Rahkesh with a mix of awe, envy, and intense interest, their minds turning over his potential uses. Far below others were trying to get the portal off the melted ledge.

_He's safe._

_How so? _

_You figure it out._ Tristan said. Asano drew a breath and smelled the air. And Rahkesh's blood. Rahkesh's blood had a tang of magic so powerful it his made his fangs ache and his entire vampiric magic long for that blood. The blood was coming from the deep gashes that crisscrossed the back of Rahkesh's neck. Almost deep enough to show bone they had been left by Namach's teeth.

_Ah, those will leave a permanent scar. And you will probably be able to send a little magic into them. _

_Precisely. Other vampires will be able to smell it in his blood or whenever they get too close. _

_He'll have a conniption fit. _

_Probably. But perhaps not. It's not like I have any control over him. Just the ability to make others vampires smell that he's off limits unless they want to challenge me. Somehow I don't think he'll mind too much. _

_What does his blood taste like?_ Asano had to ask. It smelled so _delicious_. His mouth was watering and in spite of his usual rigid self control his fangs had appeared from their usual dormant state.

_Lethal. I vaporized it rather than drink it. I do not wish to be ill for any amount of time. I have not been sick in nearly two thousand years. I don't need to be poisoned right now. I suspect his blood will easily kill a muggle vampire on contact, and gift an agonizing death to any not powerful enough to overcome it. I could do that…drink his blood and live…and I'm sure it would be extremely useful to me, but I would be seriously ill for a month or more. As for the taste…quite honestly the finest thing I've ever tasted. The worst poisons always are. _Tristan replied.

_Perhaps he should allow a few unfortunates to bite him. When they die horribly everyone else will stay away. _

_Unless they think it a challenge. And there is a possibility I am reading this wrong and they would not actually die. Whatever happened would be truly horrific, and would alter them permanently so that they died, but if they survived…I don't know and I don't really have the time to investigate. _

_I suppose we don't need any true immortals running around._ Asano agreed. A creature incapable of ever dying was about the worst-case scenario.

_I do have a plan if that should ever happen. _

"You always have a plan." Asano chuckled fondly. Sensing someone approaching he turned back towards the gold doors.

"Message from Cyala", Janus said, walking through the doors. As a necromancer he had free access. He sniffed the air and paused, staring at Rahkesh.

"Go on."

Janus blinked and tore his eyes away from the spattered blood on the young human's neck. "Her attack was also successful. And since it was on the opposite side of the world the demons will have plenty to worry about. How did your plan go?"

"Brilliantly. Only a minor setback. The demons should be dying by the thousands right about now." Namach said, grinning.

-


	30. Chapter 30

Hi all, sorry for the long wait. I've been job searching, and I re-wrote this several times to practice some new writing techniques. It occurred to me that I could just practice that on the sequel, so I could post this.

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Chapter 30

"I didn't _need _reconstructive surgery." Rahkesh growled irritably as he stared into the mirror.

"What?"

"You managed to tear my ear. My EAR! I didn't even know I _had_ ears in that form!" Rahkesh barked.

The laughter from the vampire reclining on his couch was a deep rumble, and just a little smug. Rahkesh hissed in annoyance.

"You couldn't possibly have kept your claws _out_ of my ears?!"

"You couldn't have kept your ears out from under my claws?" Namach asked back. Rahkesh twisted a little so the mirror showed him a view of his living room. The tall ancient vampire was seated on his couch drinking some famous person's blood from a diamond and emerald glass. Heavy black leather military-ish boots, dark red pants and a creamy v-necked shirt with tiny diamonds and gold thread worked into it. His wavy black hair was unusually long and seemed to meld into the shadows. Rahkesh was tempted to ask if he had conscious control of his hair length, then decided he didn't need to ask.

"I wasn't conscious." Rahkesh retorted. He looked back in the mirror again and saw Namach taking a sip from his glass, and he got an evil idea, "I wonder if thunderbirds have electrically charged earwax?"

Namach actually coughed as he tried not to inhale the blood while laughing. Rahkesh smirked to himself and finished with the tiny scar left behind on his ear.

"Say that around Strawlime and he'll be trying to get that, as well as his current list of potions ingredients, from you." Namach warned. Rahkesh grimaced, Potions Master Strawlime wanted to chop him up for experimental parts. Rahkesh had just that evening found a very polite request on his desk (and how did Strawlime get in?) asking for just about every type of bodily fluid imaginable, and even a few he'd never heard of. Birds had skin oils?

Once he was sure that the Necromancers Guild had everything well in hand Namach had returned Rahkesh to Akren. The healers had had a merry time working on some of his worse injuries, specifically the internal damage from his crushed ribs. Rahkesh couldn't quite remember the last time he'd felt agony like that. Magical full-body pain was one thing, having ribs snapped concentrated it, and that was almost worse.

After Rahkesh had woken the Akren teachers had promptly sent him home to deal with the rest of his injuries on his own. Namach had shown up ten minutes after he'd arrived to make sure he had no lasting damage from the death magic and to wait and watch while the magic moving around his bloodmagic runes evened out the tiny bit of death magic he had absorbed. Of course the vampire hadn't yet said a word about Rahkesh's out-of-control animagus, and probably wouldn't since there was little point in trying to train it when he'd be changing soon anyway.

_He and Daray are too alike._ Sygra complained from her spot in the morning sun. Or was it evening? Rahkesh had no idea. The Necromancers Guild's mountain top hall had been in a location where it had been daylight. At Akren it had been very late night. Now there was sun, and he wasn't sure how long he'd been out. _They both insist on using that couch. _

_It is a nice couch. _Rahkesh pointed out. He did good work with regards to comfort. Appearances, not so much. The poor thing looked a decade old, a little warped, sagging, battered, and rickety. It was actually only a year old and quite solid.

_Yes, but the other vampires don't kick me off it. _

_They're wary of being bitten by you. I doubt you could harm him, and he did drop you in the sun didn't he? _

_Yes. But he still took the couch. _

_Are you sure you don't have a bit of an obsession?_

_Did you just compare me to Daray? _

Rahkesh didn't respond, it was better to let that one drop. Satisfied that his ear didn't look like it had been mummified he leaned in to examine his forehead where the lightning bolt scar had once been. It was basically gone; if he looked really close there was a faint outline. A good tan would cover that. Or just a little very special magical makeup. And no one would see it anyway unless they were right in his face. Rahkesh applied it with a spell, since he messed it up with a brush.

As he drew back from the mirror the pain in the back of his neck spiked and Rahkesh winced. Reaching back he ran his fingers over the back of his neck. He remembered very clearly Namach's fangs sinking into the skin there. That Ice Dragon had some impressive teeth on it. Twisting a bit he pulled the hair off his neck.

"GODDAMN IT!"

Rahkesh's shout made Namach turn and try hard not to smirk when he saw in the mirror that Rahkesh was looking at the back of his neck. He wasn't going to say it at the moment…but he really did do some fine work with his fangs. Always a matter of some pride to a vampire.

"Oh fuck! What the hell did you _do_?!" Rahkesh shouted spinning around, fingertips sparking. Namach was behind him so fast he couldn't see him move. Grabbing Rahkesh Namach spun him back around to face the mirror. Rahkesh snarled and thunder rumbled outside. Namach sent freezing air over his face like a slap and Rahkesh winced and reigned in the stray magic.

"Stop that." Namach told him firmly. Lifting Rahkesh's hair he examined the crisscrossed mess of scars.

"Tell me that isn't permanent." Rahkesh hissed furiously. Namach sniffed at the scars, ran a finger over them, and tried very hard not to start purring. Vampires were predators after all; they _liked _the smell of furious humans, and the tiny bit of fear in there smelled delicious too.

"You're not that powerful Thunder, no, this one is permanent." He informed his student and didn't hide his smile when Rahkesh hissed at him. He was using a little magic to keep Rahkesh still for the moment, he didn't really want to have to hurt him but right now Rahkesh was almost ready to attack him. "The good news is that it is really only scars, not much magic involved."

"Not much? What those scars have your magic in them?!" Rahkesh hissed, breaking Namach's magic and spinning around.

"Hmm, yes."

"And?"

"I suspect other vampires will be able to sense it…so you're probably pretty well safe from any of the others…unless they _want_ to challenge me. Hasn't happened in a long time, last imbecile…well you won't want to know, I thought it was fun, I don't think he appreciated the art involved." Namach said, smiling in remembrance as he walked back to the couch and sat down.

Rahkesh gritted his teeth for a moment before forcing himself to relax. Namach was a master of putting more than one meaning into anything and this was no exception; the vampire had just told him not to make a fuss over the scars on his neck and that he would not accept any more temper from Rahkesh right now. Damn him. Damn him straight to hell, Rahkesh was not spending the rest of his life with a set of even _mildly_ magical scars on his neck courtesy of a vampire King. He would just have to find a way to remove them.

Well, since there was nothing he could do about it at that moment, and he _was_ going to remove the scars eventually, and they _would_ keep the world's magical vampires off him…Rahkesh brushed his hair back down and checked to make sure the mess of thin crisscrossing white scars didn't show. Fortunately they were just on the back of his neck and invisible unless someone was actually looking at the very back, and they were high enough up that his hair would cover them easily, though not if he cut it really short.

Casting some quick cleaning charms to get the last of the blood from his torn ear off his clothes and the counter Rahkesh checked his ear one last time before going to join Namach. Picking Sygra up he let her wind around his neck again and cast another cleaning charm to get a few stray blood drops off his latest cream and gold carpet (the previous one having been torched while practicing wandless magic).

"The magic flows from that wand are unlike anything I've ever felt." Namach said. Rahkesh glanced at him and thought the vampire might be _smelling_ the magic. Weird. "Have you tried to determine how much magic leaks off it?"

"Not yet." Rahkesh admitted. Whenever you cast a spell if it was visible it meant it was leaking magic off into the air around it, which was the reason spells were visible. The more control over the magic the tighter the spell and the less magic lost. During a fight that was important, sending brightly colored spells around might look cool but it was amateurish and that lost magic was likely to cause you to tire faster. Better control took more practice and experience, but it meant better endurance. Thinking back to his magic work at Hogwarts Rahkesh could easily find the difference. At Hogwarts no one had ever told the students to try to sense and control the magic they were using. They just said the words and tried to focus on what they wanted to happen and concentrate really really hard. Which was actually counter productive to some extent.

"I'm not sensing much falling off your spells, but what does come off smells a little like your blood and feels very different."

"The tree?"

"Probably. The ancestor was an Earth tree you know. Some elves died in a fight here and their remains caused a change in the trees that grew up on the bodies. The rest of the elves eventually found them and collected all the trees that had been changed and took them away. That was maybe a hundred thousand years ago, possibly longer, well okay, probably closer to five or six hundred thousand years ago, but at some point it's all the same really. They've been infusing the species with their magic and consciousness that long."

"So they'll be able to sense this easily then?" Rahkesh asked, holding up the white wand.

"Oh yes. You're lucky Xanthius isn't here."

"Am I hallucinating or are you looking forward to them coming after me?" Rahkesh asked sharply.

"Well you might very well be hallucinating, after the last twenty-four hours it wouldn't surprise me." Namach smirked at Rahkesh's snarl.

"A non-answer." Rahkesh replied, as he put his magical earrings back in. Sygra hissed and rubbed against the new scar on his ear. It would probably fade in a new days but she seemed annoyed that he'd managed to get hurt and she hadn't been there.

"Is she feeling insecure?"

"Probably. Are you looking forward to the elves going berserk?"

"You really don't know when to just let it go do you?"

"My life being in danger can cause that." Rahkesh pointed out, stroking the top of Sygra's head gently.

"Very well. Yes I'm looking forward to it. The elves currently on Earth, minus Xanthius, are the ones they could spare while their best are off fighting elsewhere. They will probably try to retrieve that tree and kill you and they won't bother asking any questions. However they really don't have much to go on. Those trees are partly sentient even as seeds and the tree had a choice between remaining dormant or accepting your blood. They can remain as seeds for centuries without damage. It had no reason to accept you other than sensing in your blood your commitment to continuing to feed it and your magical potential. That tree accepted your blood and allowed you to become part of it because of what it could get out of the deal. If the elves want to argue with that they can, but even as a seed those trees have been bred and altered to know instinctively to wait for elf blood, unless they're in an actual forest."

"Have there been Dyalnos trees growing wild on Earth?"

"Maybe five times that I know of. There are a few dormant seeds floating around still. A few thousand years ago a shipment between planets got diverted and the elves had to drop out of their magical form of travel. Earth was the closest world. I don't know what actually happened but apparently the containers didn't all make it through intact and ended up in the middle of an ocean. Hence seeds turning up everywhere for decades."

"Whatever happened must have been something pretty drastic to cause them to do that."

"Extremely. It is possible that your seeds were collected at some point and someone recognized them, or someone in your family sensed their power. Even as seeds most very plant-inclined people can sense amazing power in them, even if they have no idea what they are."

"Okay, so they're going to attack me. Why does this amuse you?" Rahkesh asked, realizing he'd been diverted. Namach fixed him with a sharp look, not quite scowling, he wasn't that expressive. Rahkesh remained stubborn. Namach leaned back into the couch and went into lecturer-mode.

"One reason? It will embarrass the elves. Once they back up a bit and think it through it really is their fault for not getting every last seed back, and, not doing that, making sure the consequences were very obvious. They even have an elf teaching at Akren, they could have at least made sure _our_ library was up to date on what to do to avoid angering them. And the tree accepted you. Elves don't actually worship trees, but they're very connected with plants and will often defer to their judgment. If they kill you and take that tree back home with them they'll have some very annoyed forests.

Having the elves make a mistake benefits Earth, and you. They hardly ever put a toe wrong and their actions, especially the ones that make not the slightest sense, almost always turn out the best possible future as a result. Humbling them is a good thing to do every once in a while. Plus this incident probably will not be kept secret, and even if someone how no one else knows I would suggest that you make sure everyone from Akren knows all about it. The elves have a formidable reputation to anyone who cares to do even a little research. This minor embarrassment will force them to increase their presence on Earth. The more connections we have with the elves the better, so long as the magical population is educated and knows to be wary.

More connections with the elves is a good thing because the better the species know each other the less chance for misunderstandings, and the better the chance that the elves will see some value in having us as allies and in helping us improve magically. Remember, they want allies. If they didn't they'd have exterminated intelligent life on earth because if the demons get us we are a liability. They want allies, their species has been basically isolated for its entire history, excepting the demons. They've been seeking allies for longer than mammals have existed on Earth.

Them trying to kill you is a mistake on their part and they will recognize that. They are proud and stubborn but they're also honest. We'll wind up with an increased elven presence on Earth, and we'll get to show off your fighting capabilities – they already know mine."

Rahkesh listened intently, trying to follow what Namach was saying. The vampire was clearly thinking big-picture and long-term. But..."why me?"

"If the elves are going to really invest in Earth they'll need evidence that we can stand up to the demons and them. War is not everything, not even to the elves, but right now it is most important. If we appear to be losing to the demons I'm not sure what the elves would do. So you're going to show them what a human can do. They've got plenty of examples for what vampires can do. We have Vierlae and a few others to show off fae magics, the centaurs have Vaire and his Guardians, the merfolk have their sea-mages. The humans have the Akren teams, a few extraordinary Necromancer -Bloodmages like Walcressen, a few extraordinary healers, and Stocklir, and way too many examples of mentally unstable products of human civilization that want to take over Earth. The most recent being Voldemort, there were five others in the last century. The werewolves have almost nothing, but they're not terribly common anyway. The humans really need a warrior with large scale destructive capabilities who is mentally stable and whom the elves can respect and like. And they will like you. They will like you a lot once they know you."

"Wonderful, I'm supposed to set some sort of example?" Rahkesh asked, feeling just a little panicked. Sygra raised her head and nudged his cheek, and reminded him that any elf who wanted to hurt him was going to have to get past her. And wasn't her species also an elven creation?

"No. You're going to show the elves what humans _can _do. Not what's common, but what the best of them can become. And you're young, even better, you're not half trained yet. The elves may be immortal but they're surprisingly favorable to wild, powerful, independent, honorable young individuals whom the elders can respect. You have Ferraidar to thank for that, before him they were not like that, not to such an extent. He's the original elven rebel and they adore him. And so I expect they'll like you, even while they'll be driven crazy by your independent nature."

"What about this transformation you refuse to tell me about?" Rahkesh asked, "I know, I know, you have good reasons." He added quickly at the hair-raising growl and actual glare he got this time. He knew he was pushing the vampire's patience on that issue, but he wanted it over with and not knowing made him nervous.

"With any luck the elves will find out about that wand at the same time you finally transform. It'll take a miracle to make those two events coincide but that would neatly solve a lot of problems. Don't worry over it. You'll be fine, their reasons for attacking you over that are a bit sounder than for being angry about the tree, but not by much."

Rahkesh dropped his head, groaning. Why did he think that this would hurt very much?

When he looked up Namach had vanished. Figured.

Focusing a little Rahkesh searched around for his rather dim connection to Nicodemus, wondering what Nic was up to.

_There you are. _Nic said when he sensed Rahkesh at the edge of his mind.

_Were you looking for me?_

_I felt…some sort of disturbance. _Nic asked in a carefully curious/concerned tone.

_Sorry. The Necromancers Guild needed me to transform into a thunderbird for them, to provide some specialized magic for their most recent attack on the demons. I got a little carried away. _

_Oh, yes, I remember, they explained their plans to everyone. Did it go well?_

_Very well._ Rahkesh said, smirking across their link.

_You sound smug. _

_I got to help kill…well at least a few thousand demons. So, yes, I am smug. How is your training going?_

_I think we will be able to help a great deal. _Nic slowly decided, in what Rahkesh figured was probably just typical Chachapoyaroan understatement of the facts. They sometimes did that.

_Can you show me? _

_We do try to keep some secrets._ Nic said, and began blinking images across too fast for Rahkesh to see.

_I think you're trying to tease but some of those images were definitely upside down. _

_No they weren't. _Nic sent the full memory to him. Rahkesh blinked hard as everything spun. Then realized that gold magic was everywhere and the spells were making him see the world upside down. _Makes it hard to fight._ Then the practice dummies spontaneously combusted. A moment later fake demons and charging Chachapoyaro warriors met in a dense forest and Rahkesh watched as the second line of war-mages ripped off the demons magics so the first line could slice them apart. _We will be as ready as possible. _

_Any updates from the MLFC on a possible time?_

_Maybe three days. Maybe four. Most of the fighters are taking today off to be with their families. _

_Is anyone filling the shelters? _

_The major population centers are being cleared out. Since we know that they intend to go after the densest magical communities first that ought to mess up their plans. They want to kill as many as possible the first day…actually they will probably attack at night...then pick off the survivors while chasing down smaller populations and groups. _

_Wonderful. I'd better never hear Daray complain again about getting bored. _Rahkesh sighed. Nic just chuckled.

_We'll manage. The demons can only come at so many at a time. This will be a slow war, but we'll endure. And they aren't any cleverer than we are._

_Never said they were, and does it make me truly insane to be looking forward to this war just a little?_

_No. The wait before the fight is the worst. Anyone who has seen one battlefield isn't going to rush to see another, except when it's inevitable and the wait is driving you crazy. Ah, Stocklir has just arrived with…demon skeletons?_

_The demons enchanted the corpses of their dead. They'll attack, if you shatter them each fragment become an entirely new animal. They have to be melted or burned to dust. _

_Not magical powers though?_ Nic asked as he walked over to the elderly human female.

_No. Actually they're good practice. Have fun. _

_And you get some rest, your mind feels tired. _Nic replied with some concern.

_Only if you will._ Rahkesh replied. Nic hadn't slept much during their fight with the Inca; he liked to plan all night.

_The other Generals insist as well._ Nic sighed. _I like battle preparations._ He said in an almost-whine.

_You're clever…when well rested._ Rahkesh said, smirking. _And I thought you were the older and theoretically mature one here. _

_Old? Ha! Just you wait, your Headmistress wants to try a joint training day if the demons don't show up on time. Old. I'll give you old, none of you will be walking out of that fight. _

_Bring it on._ Rahkesh snickered, and closed the connection. It was only much later while trying to sleep that he began to wonder if he should have told Nic about the coming fight with the elves and how serious it was likely to be.

XX

"I hate the smell of such old death." Sabien Ateres complained quietly as he circled the gold altar. Just as a precaution both he and his wife were in dark angel form at the moment. They were consciously brightening the fire coming off their wings to light the room, since an ordinary torch might react with something.

"I think that's just the mold in the corners. These are too old to really stink." Elara Ateres told him, nudging one skull with the toe of her boot. Elara's pearly white skin and bright red hair glowed against the giant dark wing and blackened walls of the stone room. Sabien, in contrast, appeared no more than a shadow. If there was anything hiding in here, it would go for her, they always did. Which was amusing since she was stronger than her bull-like mate.

There were eleven very old skeletons lying atop golden slabs in a circle radiating out from the altar. The skeletons were black, burned nearly to ash and in some cases just a little melted. By the doorway the four humans from the German National Aurors were shifting uneasily and eyeing the gold runes on the walls. The German Ministry was working again, having been rebuilt fairly effectively by those who had fled the country and then returned. This set of aurors had left when their country had decided outlaw every nonhuman sentient magical life form. They had returned to rebuild and had done a very good job of it so far. But discovering a hidden room with a portal to the demon realm below the third cellar of a local winery was more than they felt they could deal with.

This altar was clearly meant for large numbers of demons. It was not an entire cave like the mass portal in Mexico, but was rather more like what Sharahak had encountered. It would form an actual tunnel rather than using a form of teleportation. It was a gold ring some seven meters in diameter with all sorts of runes out around it. These had bowls and cups and spikes and had probably held the living internal organs of the sacrifices to provide the death magic to open it. This meant that it was also a two-way portal. Most of them were. This struck the Earthlings as odd since it was a liability – letting your enemies open the doorway.

The doors opened again and seven werewolves entered. The German packs had evacuated early and suffered few casualties. Many of them had returned recently, to change what was left of their country.

"Has it been used recently?" the alpha asked as soon as the two vampires acknowledged her.

"No." Sabien assured her, "this one hasn't been used in many centuries." There were still a few live demons floating around Earth somewhere and the MLFC suspected they had located a portal and would be the ones to finally snap the magics the elves had left to delay the demon invasion. "You're late."

The alpha grinned, her fang-like teeth glistening. "The first group of sorcerers just departed for our new home."

"That is good news. It is there then? Our teams managed to build it?"

"Well there's something there that we can travel to." One of the other werewolves explained cautiously. "Whether or not we've got a viable world is what they're trying to figure out. The good news is that the magical barrier is working perfectly."

A plume of sparks shot out of the center of the golden ring.

Werewolves, vampires, and aurors leapt out of the way, wands drawn. But nothing happened, and after several minutes the group relaxed again. Nothing, this time.

"I do hope that team gets back with good news, and soon." Elara said, touching the gold. "It's warm. The demons must be testing the elves' wards."

"We'll set a guard rotation, five at a time." The head of the German aurors suggested. "Unless there's a way to destroy it?"

"Probably not without opening it. The ones that have been destroyed were all more or less useless from overuse." Elara explained "We could try, but it might not work, and we might damage that enchantment and let them through sooner."

"Better that they come through portals we know about." The alpha werewolf pointed out. "If we destroy the ones we find then they'll just appear where we don't know about them. This way we can at least prepare some traps and enchantments of our own."

XX

"Vampires should never be allowed to play with explosives." Rahkesh told Ally, "nor should they ever be left alone with unknown chemicals." Between Ally and Rahkesh, face down on the ground, Daray glared murderously. Hanashi and Silas were working on repairing his back. The smooth sleek skin was a mass of charcoal and bits of ash.

"_Werewolves_ should not be left in charge of quality insurance of _anything_." Daray snapped at them. "It's amazing they can keep their own fleas under control, much less the magics stopping explosive chemicals from decaying."

Ally snickered "I'm sure the alumni responsible will be interested in hearing your theories. And I don't think it's their fault no one thought to check on this weapons locker in sixty years. Their spells were only guaranteed for fifty years."

"Though it probably would have made more sense to assign a few potions students to checking everything." Hanashi grimaced. "Everything in here is labeled by chemical names, not common ones, and I don't know all of it." Daray growled softly in pain as Silas cut away a hunk of flesh that had been burned to charcoal. The only thing to be done with this level of chemical contamination, even in a vampire, was to cut it all away and then use flesh regrowing potions.

"That is why we let the vampires go in first." Rahkesh replied, careful not to sound too cheerful. A healthy sense of self-preservation and a good knowledge of how much a vampire could handle before their immortality became only theoretical had led to him challenging Daray to go in first. He wasn't scared of the dark after all, he was supposed to be a creature of the night. Daray scowled at him and showed both fangs. "Terrified." Rahkesh drawled calmly. "Ready to try growing all that skin back?" Daray grimaced and sighed, dropping his forehead onto the stone floor. Ally poured the goopy sickly yellow potion onto a rag began gently rubbing it into the burned skin. Rahkesh reached out to Daray telepathically.

_Next time something explodes, transform. Those scales ought to protect you._

_Hanashi doesn't know. _

_She's not dumb and she can keep a secret. If she couldn't Silas wouldn't spend so much time with her, and if he did Cyala would complain. _Rahkesh pointed out. Cyala only paid attention when her family members were spending a little too much time in the company of someone she didn't know. Silas had probably sent in a full report on Hanashi. Which made Rahkesh all the more certain, if that was possible, that he did not want to ever become a vampire.

"I suppose we should finish the inspection while that heals." Ally gestured to Daray's back. They all glanced back into the darkened storage space. The walls had been blasted into lumps of charcoal and black sludge covered the floor. The sludge was gurgling, even though it wasn't moving, and creating tiny puffs of baby-blue fluff on its surface.

"Hazardous waste disposal for all of it." Silas sighed, "I hate writing up the report where we have to explain how we managed to create it."

"Vampire walking to loudly created sonic vibrations which caused ripples in canisters with rotting sound absorption equipment, causing unstable liquids to come into contact with pieces of the canister that hadn't been touched by liquid in sixty years, upon which the enchantments had broken and caused the glass to turn crystalline and full of microscopic holes." Rahkesh thought out loud, "there, got it all in one sentence...sort of."

"Maybe we could send samples of…whatever was created, to Professor Strawlime?" Silas asked.

"First we'll have to figure out what kind of container can handle that stuff. Then we send it to Professor Clarence for a chemical analysis. He's going to be pissed. He's already got all sorts of reactive stuff from everyone's attempts to destroy portals." Hanashi said. The black sludge gurgled ominously.

"What if it's sentient?" Ally asked. The sludge gurgled and a new puff of powdery fluff appeared.

"How sweet, it gave you a gift." Rahkesh said dryly. The baby-blue fluff dissolved hissing into clear liquid. Rahkesh cast a spell Tyler had taught him. "Water?"

"Weird." Ally twitched her wand across the walls, getting no sign of any chemicals. The sludge gurgled and more baby-blue stuff appeared.

"I wonder if it will all turn to water eventually?" Rahkesh thought, this would save them all a lot of time. More baby-blue fluff dissolved into water as he spoke.

"So if we just sit around long enough it all become water?" Ally asked. The sludge gurgled its opinion and a pile of blue fluff fizzed out.

"I could go for that. We could just take turns keeping watch." Rahkesh said. The newest fluff dissolved.

Ally thought about that for a moment. "And the rest of us can go memorize all those command codes we're supposed to know by tomorrow." A spurt of blue fluff rippled out of the black sludge.

"Or the two of you could just keep talking." Daray growled out. "The stuff is reacting to your voices." The sludge on the floor turned green. All of it. "Uh oh. It reacts to me too." The sludge went yellow.

"Cool." Silas snickered, "it must like you guys".

The sludge exploded into purple fire. Rahkesh had a shield up before the flames got close but the heat got through and sent them all running from the room. Behind them a wall of purple flame climbed to the ceiling. At Silas' feet Nuri hissed and spit at the flaming mess.

The flames vanished.

Silas opened his mouth to speak but Daray got there first, slamming his cousin's jaw shut Daray held a finger to his lips and glared at everyone. Cautiously the group walked up to Rahkesh's shield and looked in.

The sludge had been reduced to a fist-sized lump of goo. Green and purple swirls rolled around inside it and the tiny lump looked to be slowly solidifying. In a minute it was a perfectly round ball of green and purple sitting innocently on the floor. The storage unit was still a mess, broken glass everywhere, shelves crushed, ceiling scorched and the floor missing its paint. The students traded looks.

"We can run some tests on the room, just to be sure it's okay." Rahkesh said slowly. The ball didn't react. "Once we know the place is safe we can rebuild everything, put a new layer of paint on." Still nothing.

"And that?" Silas pointed to the ball.

"Well, we're going to have to get it to one of the potions professors at some point." Ally said. "But moving it might be an issue."

"Maybe I'll go get Strawlime now, ask him about it." Silas suggested. "Come on Nuri, stay away from it." He and the panther headed out of the room.

"Uh Silas." Rahkesh warned slowly as the purple and green ball began to roll after them. Silas stopped at the doorway. The little ball rolled up beside his feet, and stopped. Silas, eyeing the ball warily, took two more steps. The ball kept pace.

"Nuri, how do you feel about me getting another pet?" Silas asked. Nuri hissed.

"You'd better go see Professor Strawlime." Rahkesh said, "we don't know what that _is_."

"I told you it might be sentient." Ally muttered.

XX

A dragonfly landed on a blade of grass, settling its green jeweled wings to bask in the sun. It was barely dawn, and the sun had only just risen over the eastern ridge. The gilded rays shattered across the surface of a smooth black circular stone. Set into a white cliff the perfectly circular disk was the only thing out of place in the field, with the rest of the morning passing in lazy normality. But this would not last long. Something was happening that had not happened in many thousands of years. The black disk was sparkling gold.

From within the rock gold oozed out and down, draping itself across the cliff. Six meters down the gold hardened where it touched the earth. The oozing liquid metal spread out in layers, dripping down the white rock until the lower half of the cliff became a solid sheet of gold.

The lower edge of the sun cleared the horizon.

With an explosion like ice cracking on a frozen lake the gold split open down the middle. Red fire shot out, scorching everything before it, annihilating the dragonfly as it tried to take flight. The field burned to ash instantly. About twenty meters out the fire stopped, and vanished, extinguishing itself and leaving only a blackened rectangle before the cliff.

As the fire turned in on itself and shrank back the tattered opening in the cliff shivered and its edges rippled. Slowly the gold contorted itself into an arched gateway, inside a flaming tunnel stretched on into a blinding wall of fire.

And it was only the first one.

XX

Claire Stevens, Akren alumnus, Third Tier Bloodmage and bone surgeon, was reclining in her plush office chair, watching rows of gemstones set into the outer surface of a black box, filled with threadmagic. Each stone was "wired" to a known portal with both muggle electronics and with threadmagic. A bank of computer screens to her left showed their readouts of activity, the gemstones showed what the magic was picking up, and the bone and stone carvings on the shelf in between were attached to sensors designed to detect demonic magic.

The middle set of sensors was usually the most interesting. Their demon ally Sharahak was hopping all over the planet to test them. Or he had been. He had settled down in Bermuda after nearly teleporting into a crowd of muggle school children. Claire thought that would have been just too funny. Sharahak had evidently called it a day. Lucky bastard was probably sitting on a beach, admiring the string bikinis.

Claire glanced at the computer screens, which showed row after row of zeros, and looked back down at her newspaper. They were still running with the story about Sharahak, the unfortunate vampire who'd gotten stuck in a demon's body, and then in the demon realm, for a thousand years. Rotten luck, he must have had some seriously bad karma built up from a previous life.

The latest bit of info the reporters were all in a tizzy about was that Sharahak's physical appearance had been disguised for so long. The nitwits couldn't seem to wrap their minds around _any_ of the reasons why keeping Sharahak a secret might be a good idea. He'd been passed off as a vampire, then as a demon of different colorings, and now as he was, when all attempts at concealment had been more effort than they were worth. Sharahak had made it very clear that he would never return to the demon realm, and the demons probably wouldn't think of him as much of a threat – to them he was just an old recluse. And so divulging his real appearance hadn't been an issue. Except for the reporters, who were really just upset that they'd been fooled.

One of the sensors made a bleeping noise. Claire looked up. It wasn't in Bermuda. The sensors were located in a network across every continent except Australia and Antarctica. They had been an idea of the fairies, and had been jointly created by the goblins and a few werewolves. The sensors flashed and made little noises when they detected something.

The same sensor went off again. Claire pulled out a notebook and checked its location. A valley in…Nepal, far down the slopes near Kathmandu.

Shrieking like an air raid siren the sensor blared to life. Claire, acting on autopilot, slammed her finger tips into the ruby red hand print on the table.

All over the world sirens went off.

Claire's supervisor, an auror from South Africa, came running into the room. The sensor was going berserk, flashing bright enough to blind. Claire was reading off the coordinates into a recording unit.

Then the whole sensor network came alive. Warning sirens fired off and the entire bank of sensors burst into light.

Next the computers set off their sirens, flashing red lights indicating activity at six known portals. The magical detectors followed instantly with identical warnings. Then the computers abruptly went silent. The magical detectors did not, their sirens wailing through the monitoring station. The supervisor turned down the volume and checked the computers, their electronic motion detectors must have been fried.

Claire had already hit the attack signal, sending out an instant communication to every magical settlement on the planet, and every set of armed fighters they had, that the demons had begun their invasion. Next she hit a series of controls, first on a muggle keyboard and then on a magical one, sending the locations of the six activating portals out to everyone.

Claire's supervisor took over the second chair and began using the sensor array to triangulate as closely as possible where the demonic magic was coming from. Seconds later eight more technicians joined them at the other work stations around the room. They already had a plan in place which split the world into sectors, and each of them went to work putting in the commands to find where the magic was coming from in their sector.

Exactly six minutes later every armed services unit received the full set of coordinates, as accurate as possible, of every piece of demonic magic the sensors could pick up. Claire remembered at the last minute to remove Sharahak from the group, while her supervisor removed the laboratories where portals were being studied, those were already being guarded. A total of forty-seven locations remained.

"It's started." Claire whispered.

"Send everything to Stocklir's command post and to Verens evac center." Her supervisor snapped. Stocklir would have updates on who was available to fight where, and her team would send deployment orders. Veren, a veela, was in charge of managing evacuations, local teams would be reporting in to her and she would be coordinating supplies and travel routes.

XX

At Akren Rahkesh dressed quickly and methodically. He, like everyone else, had his clothing and weapons stored in the middle of his room, ready to be put on. The students had been divided into three rotating shifts, which would, theoretically, trade off fighting duties every seven hours. This way they would have fourteen hours between fights, if everything worked right.

Rahkesh's weapon set, like that of everyone else, was highly personalized. His staff, two swords, four knives, tasers, potions, a prototype of a muggle handgun that some creative witch had come up with that might work against demons, his wand, and armored clothing. Other students would be carrying whatever they were best with.

Rahkesh had two possible roles, both of them either solitary or working with a small team. One of them was attacking as a thunderbird or as a basilisk. The other was to work with a group to get to the portal and destroy it, or, alternatively, the demons working it. They would have to evaluate the situation as they arrived. Fortunately Rahkesh was completely healed, had had two days of rest, and was ready for a fight, in any form.

Rahkesh was with all of his friends, and a collection of students from other years. They were assembled in front of the main entrance four minutes after the alarms went off. Professors Darkwind and Masamba were already there.

"Is everyone ready?" Masamba asked gently, as if they were not about to go to war. "Very well then." The tiger fae gave everyone a mental imagine of their destination, a lonely line of hills close to a hundred kilometers northeast of Edmonton, Canada. Darkwind sent portkeys flying to everyone. The students clipped the bands into place around their left wrists. They were word or thought activated. When he was sure everyone had what they needed Darkwind nodded to Masamba. Masamba turned back to the students. "We will assemble on sight under the cover of the trees. Two auror teams, a werewolf pack, a fairy clan, a wolf fae pack, and the local centaurs are joining us. On three, one, two, three."

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The End!

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Please review.

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Good news, I will have some limited writing time and internet access, meaning that I will probably start working on the next fic in about a month, and posting chapters maybe a month later. Check back in early July, if I'm not posting then check back again in early August. I won't be able to put up a note here when the next chapter starts or might delete my fic.

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I had a suggestion to start an email list for people who want to know when my next fic starts. My email is If you want to know when I post the first chapter of the third part in this series you must send me an email address. I will try to collect them all and send out an email to everyone, no promises so check back at my page in a few months.

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We'll get to Rahkesh's final transformation early in the next fic. Obviously most of the next fic will take place during an active war and will involve a lot of fighting. I may also go and rewrite some pieces of the first fic a bit at some point. No detail changes really, and only if I get motivated and have the time.


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